Hi Arnold - I'd challenge your "Magic Fairy Dust" characterization. As the parent of a high school senior and a high school sophomore, I'm directly in the cohort most focused on this topic. There is a segment of parents who do believe in the magic fair dust and I think they are broken out into Rich Man/Poor Man roots. At the very top end, if you think your kids are going to Ivy League Schools, it is very reasonable to confer that process as magic. Graduates from these universities are credentialed for life in an inside game. At the low end, families who are sending the first generation to college "buy the dream" that just getting a college degree is truly some kind of magic that will magically lead to upward mobility. These are the folks most featured in stories of kids going to mid-level schools and taking on 100,000 in debt for a sociology degree.
The folks in the middle, (like me), see this as a giant trap that we are being forced into with very few options. The quality of the college experience has somehow degraded at the same alarming rate at which the cost has risen. Being taught what to think instead of how to think while living in a place nicer than what their first apartment should be sets up every kind of bad outcome imaginable for society. Intellectual automatons who are conditioned to live beyond their means and fuel lifestyle with debt are the logical product of this system. However - what are the other options? It is a rigged game that pisses us off.
Our approach was to send our son to the University of Alabama on a full academic scholarship focused on STEM & Finance. Go get hard skills for free, and we will expend a ton of energy lining up internships that will help him hit the ground running. 8 years ago if you told me our son was going to Alabama, I would have asked what the hell went wrong. Now it feels like the best choice in a sea of bad choices. I'd love to tell my kids to take philosophy classes and the classics and debate the ideas in the western canon, but I'll be pushing them away from any class that doesn't have math due to the rot horizontally across all of academia. God's speed to some other solution. At least we will have no debt associated with higher education and we'll get to see some good football. Roll Tide.
This is nearly the same for me. I'd add a couple points:
1. To underscore your point that the Ivy League is rigged, I see this article from the WSJ is getting some traction. My wife even sent it to me yesterday:
"Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard, according to a 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research."
2. Generally speaking, ruthlessly apply cost-benefit analysis unless you get a full scholarship. At most schools you can import up to 30 credits, so if you can get a lot of preliminary coursework out of the way for half-price at a community college, do it. In practice, intro and non-major specific 100-200 level courses are almost always commoditized and taught identically. So if your choice is to pay $370/credit at the main school or $150 at the community college, and the former is a 300 student lecture and the latter is a 30 student seminar, you're better off in most respects by taking it at the community college level.
The goal should be zero debt for an undergraduate degree. The student can then, as a fully independent adult ,choose to pursue more education, if that is desired, and figure out a means of paying for it.
I value what the university experience can provide for young adults. It just shouldn't put the young adult and parents in such a financial hole.
Thanks for calling this out. If the post was unclear and too whiny, that is a function of poor writing on my part. Very grateful to be in a position to take a "free look" at college. The thrust of the frustration I was trying to communicate is that parents of kids currently in high school feel like they are forced to participate in this system which for most is financially draining, and objectively may be doing "less than nothing" or actual harm to the future prospects of their children.
Behind door A: Debt financing a college degree that very well may not add any useful skills and/or could actively be educating this generation against many of the societal structures that have advanced civilization to its highest instantiation while doing so more equally and rapidly than any period of progress in human history. (Imperfectly and with room to improve is the common sense caveat that seems required.)
Behind door B: Difficulty in finding meaningful employment, reduced job mobility, entire fields of work unavailable to you even though they do not utilize any of the skills acquired in many of the degrees that would qualify one for entry.
"But its free for you." Doesn't negate the systemic rot that was what I was attempting to bemoan. And everything has a cost. 4 years of an 18 - 22 year old's life is a very valuable chunk of time, even if spent expense free. And intellectually it is not a pleasant place to be to have serious qualms about a system and still participate in it. Sending our child at whatever cost through this system further validates it. After nearly 2 decades of investing into the human capital of our 18 year old, saying "we'll be the first to go another route and see if it works" doesn't feel like an option. Do I have to shut up about higher education's problems now that we are participating? Probably not, but the complaints ring a little hollow.
At the end of the day, there are a group of "elites" (in the societal status sense of the word) who have devised a rigged game, where to become an adult you have to expend massive amounts of money and/or time to get their blessing over a 4 year period before being allowed to enter productive, respectable society. 90% of the "blessers" are in one political tribe that represents the views of <50% of the population. They have jobs for life and can force your children to literally parrot back to them word for word utter nonsense in order to receive their blessing. On top of the already biased blessers, a structure of commissars in the form of administrators has been added over the last several decades that attempts with varying degrees of subtlety and force to root out any heterodox viewpoints amongst the blessers or students. Cultures of "report on your fellow students or teachers who are not following the true faith" are exposed on a regular basis. There is no reason to believe that individual victories over the most egregious of these have changed the underlying system, its constant momentum in one direction, or the net result of inbred ideological/intellectual retardation within the structures set up to "educate" our children.
The more I write, the less I want to send our son to college and the more I understand "helicopter parents". Thanks again for calling me out if I sounded entitled and whiny. I'm trying to come across as angry and trapped.
I find this entire discussion to be a bit myopic. All views appear to be from the position of finding the best system to drop on students from above.
When parents, individually, come to believe that their job is to raise their children to be ready, willing and able to surmount obstacles, these young people will be more able and inclined to avoid being funneled thru someone else’s concocted system.
Virtues will get a person a long long way. Show up, work hard, listen to others. At all times you have a responsibility to think, and an opportunity to learn.
In my view, it is a sad state of affairs when parents raise their children to think that they must submit to be herded thru some other persons cattle chute.
When enough young people reject the current ridiculous system, one thing that will develop will be educators for hire. Direct payment from students to teachers. (10$ x 20 students = $200 in the educators pocket....not bad for an hour of work)
As long as children are raised to be sheep, you will have a system suitable for sheep.
Well said! Ultimately, the issue is most occupations do not require 4+ years of college.
I am personally in favor of a low cost environment that helps 18 year olds get some non-fatal lessons in the school of hard knocks, gain increased exposure to the world and people in it, and make it to age 21 with some measure of common sense, personal confidence, and possessing some marketable skills, which may be as simple as knowing to show up on time and understanding there are real world consequences to carelessness.
One problem with the modern university is too many students are not gaining any wisdom, and what wisdom they had is being replaced with nonsense! And for that experience they are accumulating tens of thousands of dollars of debt.
I think most families are being discerning on how best help their teenagers make it to adulthood. However, the high school guidance counselor mantra of college, college college is powerful. What is needed is more high school counselors showing ways for Johnny to have something to do after graduation other than more time in the classroom!
> As of now, upper-middle-class parents are convinced that college is magic fairy-dust for preserving high social status, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when all of the high-aptitude kids go to college. The challenge is to peel some high-aptitude children away from the college route and to demonstrate that the alternative does not cost them a loss of status.
I'm a good target audience for your idea because I've got two kids nearing college age, and I think about this a lot.
I like your idea but I have the following concerns:
1. I think the biggest problem is that degrees are actually pretty highly regulated and getting a degree is a more generally applicable ticket to high social status than letters of recommendation or introduction. The latter depend on employers knowing and respecting the sources. The former, degrees, are often legally mandated, so in many cases, if my kids went to NetUniv, they'd be legally disqualified from many, many jobs. It would take a massive amount of corporate or organizational goodwill to set aside the way they use degrees.
2. There is problem of scale. If I'm really getting, say, a good letter of recommendation from a Goldman Sachs exec, or well known former exec, that's something. But... I don't think that's scalable. We're talking about thousands and ultimately millions of people that go through this process or who get employees through it. In this respect, getting a degree isn't just self-fulfillingly useful, it's a well-understood and standardized, if imperfect signal. The highly personalized and variable nature of letters from individualized teachers and students is going to have a hard time here.
Taken together, I'd say that NetUniv could only work in a notionally libertarian society. A small one in which people can actually know each other, and there aren't a lot of overwhelming regulations. In the society we have, even though I don't like it, I need my kids to get degrees. Not just because everyone does it, but because 1) it's regulated into necessity and 2) it's a universally observable standard of merit.
You are raising an important hypothesis about NetUniv, which is that the faculty and student network becomes the magic fairy dust. Even now, at least in the private sector, many hiring managers will check you out through LinkedIn rather than just look at where you got your degree. I see that as evidence for my hypothesis. But it's an empirical question.
I see this question as whether we could reverse the first order and second order conditions. I think "Look at their degree" is the first order condition. If that checks out, hirers will look at connections and references.
Could we reverse that, so that the employer is so wowed by connections and references, that it becomes the first order condition (or, actually, both necessary and sufficient)?
Here I'm skeptical, because I think, what sort of LOR/LOI/Internship would be necessary to get the average employer to forget about the lack of a degree?
At the extreme, suppose I get a LOR and a detailed description of my training with, say, Elon Musk. I suspect that would open a lot of doors. But:
1. It might also close some. Not that I'd want one, but it won't do me any favors with Elizabeth Warren. And vice versa. Getting the AOC stamp of approval is probably a death sentence to working at Amazon. My educational investment would be that much more at the mercy of cancel culture.
2. There's a very restricted amount of Elon Musk to go around. As things scale up, will the recommendation of my acquaintance Ken R, who's a literal rocket scientist who's worked with Elon Musk go as far? Quality wise, it should, but much more narrowly, and the reputation benefits aren't there.
3. Alternatively, we can't let Elon Musk turn into Donald Trump University either. Slapping the name on something that he's not truly and deeply into will just dilute the value in a different way.
Conferences seem expensively synchronous. Why not instead meet up with profs ad-hoc as they travel for small collegial gatherings that focus on capstone-style synthesis?
Maybe run a great kurultai once a year someplace cheap? cf. old burning man or vegas in summer, where it is more for the students than for the profs?
I like the premise! $50 an hour for faculty time seems unrealistically low, though. It's hard to get good grad student graders offering $50 an hour for that.
Also, you seem to suggest that it's possible for someone without a PhD in classics to be qualified to teach the classics. That is very very far from the truth. Even most classics PhDs probably don't deserve to be considered qualified to teach the subject, it's insanely difficult to understand.
Second, you have to think about how NetUniv would fit within a traditional background check. That seeks to confirm the institution, the grant of a degree, any majors or minors, and dates of attendance. I’m not suggesting that those fields must have the same meaning, but being able to fill in that blank would be useful.
After thinking about it, I'd guess you have to get a little less ambitious and work back to something like a degree. I'd give on that, and hold firm on grading and some basic elements of curriculum.
Maybe:
1. Rather than seeking out experts, seek out industries. Go canvas the biggest, most prestigious industries, and get their buy in on what basic competencies need to be demonstrated. Ask the question, "If I set up my academy to produce this person, will you hire them?" Have a team from Facebook, Google, and Microsoft define the programming curriculum. Have a team from Goldman, Chase and Wells Fargo develop and certify the finance curriculum. Etc.
Whether or not you call this a degree, you get a commitment from all the major industries to consider your graduates, so long as they get far enough down whatever particular pathway they've taken. Maybe they actively take part by way of apprenticeship style operations? And, you've depersonalized the outcome, so graduates are no longer at quite so much of a disadvantage if a particular teacher or company gets cancelled?
I would love to read your take on Deep Springs College. It offers no degrees, but a classical curriculum and (seemingly) opportunity for divergent, haphazard, wandering minds.
Relative to my taste, Deep Springs seems to be too tightly designed. Like Minerva in that sense. What I have in mind would be much looser, with important design decisions made at the edges, by students and faculty, rather than reflecting a strong central vision.
That makes sense. However, the students at Deep Springs create their own curriculum, create their own rules for living, determine who is accepted and who graduates. Seems rather decentralized.
But it still feels confining to me. My vision is for an approach that uses network scale to overcome the advantages that legacy institutions give to their graduates.
To add to the in-person aspect, you might consider supplemental regional meet-ups as well, but that would depend on some measure of geographical concentration/critical mass.
Sounds like a cool idea. Maybe this could start out as something like a for-credit internship program, selecting elite 1st or 2nd year college students for one or two semesters of intense work followed by mentoring check-ins and conferences periodically through the rest of the college years, hopefully arranged with the university to avoid extending the amount of time the student stays at the university. Maybe this could first gain traction as a supplement to a traditional college experience, and then once it has built up prestige you could spin off a riskier stand-alone model.
I'm sorry, but I am not excited by your suggestion. The idea of getting rid of grades and "for-credit" is very dear to my heart. I want to shift away from those sorts of badges and instead toward letters of recommendation and letters of introduction.
The only benefit of a baby steps approach would be to build up some name recognition before asking students to take a huge risk and turn down Harvard for NetUniv21.
I’m sure the first class of NetUniv21 would have no trouble getting a great education or finding a great job in the network. The risk is that 5 years down the road when she applies for another job “out of network” she has NetUniv21 on her resume, not Harvard.
If the bet pays off, the employer will see this as a mark of distinction and the credential culture will start to crumble, but the risk is that the employer will have no idea what to do with the resume in a culture of badges and grades.
I find the lack of a proposed objective quality control measure a little offputting. Grade inflation has wrecked higher education, sure, but I don't know if I think the answer is to give up on it and replace it with the potentially nepotistic and/or sycophantic system of personal letters of recommendation. In an era of highly politicized higher education, I think I would be worried that taking away objective criteria for student evaluation and replacing it with subjective faculty judgement seems like just one more way to enforce ideological uniformity.
Hi Arnold - I'd challenge your "Magic Fairy Dust" characterization. As the parent of a high school senior and a high school sophomore, I'm directly in the cohort most focused on this topic. There is a segment of parents who do believe in the magic fair dust and I think they are broken out into Rich Man/Poor Man roots. At the very top end, if you think your kids are going to Ivy League Schools, it is very reasonable to confer that process as magic. Graduates from these universities are credentialed for life in an inside game. At the low end, families who are sending the first generation to college "buy the dream" that just getting a college degree is truly some kind of magic that will magically lead to upward mobility. These are the folks most featured in stories of kids going to mid-level schools and taking on 100,000 in debt for a sociology degree.
The folks in the middle, (like me), see this as a giant trap that we are being forced into with very few options. The quality of the college experience has somehow degraded at the same alarming rate at which the cost has risen. Being taught what to think instead of how to think while living in a place nicer than what their first apartment should be sets up every kind of bad outcome imaginable for society. Intellectual automatons who are conditioned to live beyond their means and fuel lifestyle with debt are the logical product of this system. However - what are the other options? It is a rigged game that pisses us off.
Our approach was to send our son to the University of Alabama on a full academic scholarship focused on STEM & Finance. Go get hard skills for free, and we will expend a ton of energy lining up internships that will help him hit the ground running. 8 years ago if you told me our son was going to Alabama, I would have asked what the hell went wrong. Now it feels like the best choice in a sea of bad choices. I'd love to tell my kids to take philosophy classes and the classics and debate the ideas in the western canon, but I'll be pushing them away from any class that doesn't have math due to the rot horizontally across all of academia. God's speed to some other solution. At least we will have no debt associated with higher education and we'll get to see some good football. Roll Tide.
This is nearly the same for me. I'd add a couple points:
1. To underscore your point that the Ivy League is rigged, I see this article from the WSJ is getting some traction. My wife even sent it to me yesterday:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/to-get-into-the-ivy-league-extraordinary-isnt-always-enough-these-days-11650546000
"Nearly half of white students admitted to Harvard between 2009 and 2014 were recruited athletes, legacy students, children of faculty and staff, or on the dean’s interest list—applicants whose parents or relatives have donated to Harvard, according to a 2019 study published in the National Bureau of Economic Research."
2. Generally speaking, ruthlessly apply cost-benefit analysis unless you get a full scholarship. At most schools you can import up to 30 credits, so if you can get a lot of preliminary coursework out of the way for half-price at a community college, do it. In practice, intro and non-major specific 100-200 level courses are almost always commoditized and taught identically. So if your choice is to pay $370/credit at the main school or $150 at the community college, and the former is a 300 student lecture and the latter is a 30 student seminar, you're better off in most respects by taking it at the community college level.
High school AP courses, if your university allows them, can get you out of the garbage of freshman year.
The goal should be zero debt for an undergraduate degree. The student can then, as a fully independent adult ,choose to pursue more education, if that is desired, and figure out a means of paying for it.
I value what the university experience can provide for young adults. It just shouldn't put the young adult and parents in such a financial hole.
Thanks for calling this out. If the post was unclear and too whiny, that is a function of poor writing on my part. Very grateful to be in a position to take a "free look" at college. The thrust of the frustration I was trying to communicate is that parents of kids currently in high school feel like they are forced to participate in this system which for most is financially draining, and objectively may be doing "less than nothing" or actual harm to the future prospects of their children.
Behind door A: Debt financing a college degree that very well may not add any useful skills and/or could actively be educating this generation against many of the societal structures that have advanced civilization to its highest instantiation while doing so more equally and rapidly than any period of progress in human history. (Imperfectly and with room to improve is the common sense caveat that seems required.)
Behind door B: Difficulty in finding meaningful employment, reduced job mobility, entire fields of work unavailable to you even though they do not utilize any of the skills acquired in many of the degrees that would qualify one for entry.
"But its free for you." Doesn't negate the systemic rot that was what I was attempting to bemoan. And everything has a cost. 4 years of an 18 - 22 year old's life is a very valuable chunk of time, even if spent expense free. And intellectually it is not a pleasant place to be to have serious qualms about a system and still participate in it. Sending our child at whatever cost through this system further validates it. After nearly 2 decades of investing into the human capital of our 18 year old, saying "we'll be the first to go another route and see if it works" doesn't feel like an option. Do I have to shut up about higher education's problems now that we are participating? Probably not, but the complaints ring a little hollow.
At the end of the day, there are a group of "elites" (in the societal status sense of the word) who have devised a rigged game, where to become an adult you have to expend massive amounts of money and/or time to get their blessing over a 4 year period before being allowed to enter productive, respectable society. 90% of the "blessers" are in one political tribe that represents the views of <50% of the population. They have jobs for life and can force your children to literally parrot back to them word for word utter nonsense in order to receive their blessing. On top of the already biased blessers, a structure of commissars in the form of administrators has been added over the last several decades that attempts with varying degrees of subtlety and force to root out any heterodox viewpoints amongst the blessers or students. Cultures of "report on your fellow students or teachers who are not following the true faith" are exposed on a regular basis. There is no reason to believe that individual victories over the most egregious of these have changed the underlying system, its constant momentum in one direction, or the net result of inbred ideological/intellectual retardation within the structures set up to "educate" our children.
The more I write, the less I want to send our son to college and the more I understand "helicopter parents". Thanks again for calling me out if I sounded entitled and whiny. I'm trying to come across as angry and trapped.
I find this entire discussion to be a bit myopic. All views appear to be from the position of finding the best system to drop on students from above.
When parents, individually, come to believe that their job is to raise their children to be ready, willing and able to surmount obstacles, these young people will be more able and inclined to avoid being funneled thru someone else’s concocted system.
Virtues will get a person a long long way. Show up, work hard, listen to others. At all times you have a responsibility to think, and an opportunity to learn.
In my view, it is a sad state of affairs when parents raise their children to think that they must submit to be herded thru some other persons cattle chute.
When enough young people reject the current ridiculous system, one thing that will develop will be educators for hire. Direct payment from students to teachers. (10$ x 20 students = $200 in the educators pocket....not bad for an hour of work)
As long as children are raised to be sheep, you will have a system suitable for sheep.
Well said! Ultimately, the issue is most occupations do not require 4+ years of college.
I am personally in favor of a low cost environment that helps 18 year olds get some non-fatal lessons in the school of hard knocks, gain increased exposure to the world and people in it, and make it to age 21 with some measure of common sense, personal confidence, and possessing some marketable skills, which may be as simple as knowing to show up on time and understanding there are real world consequences to carelessness.
One problem with the modern university is too many students are not gaining any wisdom, and what wisdom they had is being replaced with nonsense! And for that experience they are accumulating tens of thousands of dollars of debt.
I think most families are being discerning on how best help their teenagers make it to adulthood. However, the high school guidance counselor mantra of college, college college is powerful. What is needed is more high school counselors showing ways for Johnny to have something to do after graduation other than more time in the classroom!
I was going to ask you about your thoughts on the Thiel Fellowship, but then I came to my senses and Googled for what you had written before on the matter. I found your 2019 Thiel/Weinstein interview annotations at https://medium.com/@arnoldkling/peter-thiel-and-eric-weinstein-annotated-bd1de574d4bd to be worth rereading.
> As of now, upper-middle-class parents are convinced that college is magic fairy-dust for preserving high social status, and that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy when all of the high-aptitude kids go to college. The challenge is to peel some high-aptitude children away from the college route and to demonstrate that the alternative does not cost them a loss of status.
I'm a good target audience for your idea because I've got two kids nearing college age, and I think about this a lot.
I like your idea but I have the following concerns:
1. I think the biggest problem is that degrees are actually pretty highly regulated and getting a degree is a more generally applicable ticket to high social status than letters of recommendation or introduction. The latter depend on employers knowing and respecting the sources. The former, degrees, are often legally mandated, so in many cases, if my kids went to NetUniv, they'd be legally disqualified from many, many jobs. It would take a massive amount of corporate or organizational goodwill to set aside the way they use degrees.
2. There is problem of scale. If I'm really getting, say, a good letter of recommendation from a Goldman Sachs exec, or well known former exec, that's something. But... I don't think that's scalable. We're talking about thousands and ultimately millions of people that go through this process or who get employees through it. In this respect, getting a degree isn't just self-fulfillingly useful, it's a well-understood and standardized, if imperfect signal. The highly personalized and variable nature of letters from individualized teachers and students is going to have a hard time here.
Taken together, I'd say that NetUniv could only work in a notionally libertarian society. A small one in which people can actually know each other, and there aren't a lot of overwhelming regulations. In the society we have, even though I don't like it, I need my kids to get degrees. Not just because everyone does it, but because 1) it's regulated into necessity and 2) it's a universally observable standard of merit.
You are raising an important hypothesis about NetUniv, which is that the faculty and student network becomes the magic fairy dust. Even now, at least in the private sector, many hiring managers will check you out through LinkedIn rather than just look at where you got your degree. I see that as evidence for my hypothesis. But it's an empirical question.
I see this question as whether we could reverse the first order and second order conditions. I think "Look at their degree" is the first order condition. If that checks out, hirers will look at connections and references.
Could we reverse that, so that the employer is so wowed by connections and references, that it becomes the first order condition (or, actually, both necessary and sufficient)?
Here I'm skeptical, because I think, what sort of LOR/LOI/Internship would be necessary to get the average employer to forget about the lack of a degree?
At the extreme, suppose I get a LOR and a detailed description of my training with, say, Elon Musk. I suspect that would open a lot of doors. But:
1. It might also close some. Not that I'd want one, but it won't do me any favors with Elizabeth Warren. And vice versa. Getting the AOC stamp of approval is probably a death sentence to working at Amazon. My educational investment would be that much more at the mercy of cancel culture.
2. There's a very restricted amount of Elon Musk to go around. As things scale up, will the recommendation of my acquaintance Ken R, who's a literal rocket scientist who's worked with Elon Musk go as far? Quality wise, it should, but much more narrowly, and the reputation benefits aren't there.
3. Alternatively, we can't let Elon Musk turn into Donald Trump University either. Slapping the name on something that he's not truly and deeply into will just dilute the value in a different way.
Conferences seem expensively synchronous. Why not instead meet up with profs ad-hoc as they travel for small collegial gatherings that focus on capstone-style synthesis?
Maybe run a great kurultai once a year someplace cheap? cf. old burning man or vegas in summer, where it is more for the students than for the profs?
I like the premise! $50 an hour for faculty time seems unrealistically low, though. It's hard to get good grad student graders offering $50 an hour for that.
Also, you seem to suggest that it's possible for someone without a PhD in classics to be qualified to teach the classics. That is very very far from the truth. Even most classics PhDs probably don't deserve to be considered qualified to teach the subject, it's insanely difficult to understand.
Two things:
First, I’d teach for free at such an initiative.
Second, you have to think about how NetUniv would fit within a traditional background check. That seeks to confirm the institution, the grant of a degree, any majors or minors, and dates of attendance. I’m not suggesting that those fields must have the same meaning, but being able to fill in that blank would be useful.
After thinking about it, I'd guess you have to get a little less ambitious and work back to something like a degree. I'd give on that, and hold firm on grading and some basic elements of curriculum.
Maybe:
1. Rather than seeking out experts, seek out industries. Go canvas the biggest, most prestigious industries, and get their buy in on what basic competencies need to be demonstrated. Ask the question, "If I set up my academy to produce this person, will you hire them?" Have a team from Facebook, Google, and Microsoft define the programming curriculum. Have a team from Goldman, Chase and Wells Fargo develop and certify the finance curriculum. Etc.
Whether or not you call this a degree, you get a commitment from all the major industries to consider your graduates, so long as they get far enough down whatever particular pathway they've taken. Maybe they actively take part by way of apprenticeship style operations? And, you've depersonalized the outcome, so graduates are no longer at quite so much of a disadvantage if a particular teacher or company gets cancelled?
I like that this model harnesses the natural creativity of students, though I can see some potential drawbacks. Would be a fun discussion to have.
This ACX book review of “How Children Fail” might be of interest.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/your-book-review-how-children-fail?s=r
This may be an alternative for K-12: https://thedailyscroll.substack.com/p/alana-newhouse-new-american-education?s=r
I would love to read your take on Deep Springs College. It offers no degrees, but a classical curriculum and (seemingly) opportunity for divergent, haphazard, wandering minds.
Relative to my taste, Deep Springs seems to be too tightly designed. Like Minerva in that sense. What I have in mind would be much looser, with important design decisions made at the edges, by students and faculty, rather than reflecting a strong central vision.
That makes sense. However, the students at Deep Springs create their own curriculum, create their own rules for living, determine who is accepted and who graduates. Seems rather decentralized.
But it still feels confining to me. My vision is for an approach that uses network scale to overcome the advantages that legacy institutions give to their graduates.
Creative and intriguing concept.
To add to the in-person aspect, you might consider supplemental regional meet-ups as well, but that would depend on some measure of geographical concentration/critical mass.
Sounds like a cool idea. Maybe this could start out as something like a for-credit internship program, selecting elite 1st or 2nd year college students for one or two semesters of intense work followed by mentoring check-ins and conferences periodically through the rest of the college years, hopefully arranged with the university to avoid extending the amount of time the student stays at the university. Maybe this could first gain traction as a supplement to a traditional college experience, and then once it has built up prestige you could spin off a riskier stand-alone model.
I'm sorry, but I am not excited by your suggestion. The idea of getting rid of grades and "for-credit" is very dear to my heart. I want to shift away from those sorts of badges and instead toward letters of recommendation and letters of introduction.
The only benefit of a baby steps approach would be to build up some name recognition before asking students to take a huge risk and turn down Harvard for NetUniv21.
I’m sure the first class of NetUniv21 would have no trouble getting a great education or finding a great job in the network. The risk is that 5 years down the road when she applies for another job “out of network” she has NetUniv21 on her resume, not Harvard.
If the bet pays off, the employer will see this as a mark of distinction and the credential culture will start to crumble, but the risk is that the employer will have no idea what to do with the resume in a culture of badges and grades.
I find the lack of a proposed objective quality control measure a little offputting. Grade inflation has wrecked higher education, sure, but I don't know if I think the answer is to give up on it and replace it with the potentially nepotistic and/or sycophantic system of personal letters of recommendation. In an era of highly politicized higher education, I think I would be worried that taking away objective criteria for student evaluation and replacing it with subjective faculty judgement seems like just one more way to enforce ideological uniformity.
New College of Florida has no grades, just teacher eval essays, and seems to be holding its own regarding graduate program admissions.