Re: "enable students to learn remotely, while providing for sufficient in-person contact to bond with other students and with faculty."
Can occasional conferences provide sufficient in-person contact, compared to the Ivy model (selective, residential college campus)?
Your model places great hope in conferences. Have you attended a large conference lately?
I teach elective seminars at a fancy college, about topics that students and employers alike find intriguing, mainly around case studies in quirky orgs, markets, behaviors: "Mafia," "College," "Sports," "Prohibitions," "Internship with Seminar: Behavior in Organizations," and "Internship with Seminar: Normative Analysis of Organizations." I use these topics as vehicles to introduce undergrads to what you call cultural analysis (interdisciplinary, mainly qualitative social science). Thanks to the pandemic shock, I have taught these courses also online.
Some field observations, in no particular order of importance:
Even well-motivated undergrads have difficulty avoiding distraction during online seminar meetings. By contrast, they are on task during in-person seminars.
Even well-motivated undergrads have difficulty achieving steady application in courses that meet only once a week. Therefore, I schedule my seminars MWF for an hour, instead of once a week for three hours.
Ambitious undergrads care plenty about grades ("Grade me, damn it!"), but care much more about peer perception in a seminar. Therefore, I place more weight on seminar presentations and debates -- i.e., student performance on stage with an audience of peers, presenting, persuading, responding, and helping to manage discussion -- than on papers and projects outside of class. Every student readily meets with me for a tutorial a week before doing a seminar presentation or debate, and sends draft slides for timely feedback and guidance; but few students meet with me to brainstorm about papers, or to send drafts of papers for timely guidance.
Student-athletes experience hierarchy (coach/captain/players), teamwork, objective individual performance metrics (player stats), and objective organizational performance metrics (wins/losses), all in a general context of voluntary cooperation to compete within established rules of a game. This sounds a lot like corporations and markets. By contrast, academic production is more solitary. One might imagine that participation in team sports would have a comparative advantage in educating youths for the workplace mix of hierarchy, teamwork, competition, metrics, and org goals. However, as far as I can tell, transfer of learning usually fails to occur, from sports team to the seminar or to the workplace. Student-athletes rarely relate to professors, fellow students, managers, or workplace colleagues, and attendant 'I in team' issues, as they relate to coach, captain, and sports team.
In real-world decision contexts -- for example, jury trials, corporate policy-making, or pitches for venture capital -- persuasion by argument and by evidence usually occurs on stage, though verbal presentation, rather than through persuasive writing. Again, seminars, organized around presentations and debates, largely in person, have an edge in education.
The thrust of your model is to provide an alternative to the Ivies. There is indeed much room and need for improvement in elite education. And the decentralized, entrepreneurial model is attractive. Might a bigger payoff arise by developing alternatives to college altogether for the average youth? One example might be radical vouchers (or philanthropic vouchers) for experiments in human-capital formation via apprenticeships, internships, training programs, and the like.
What about NBU's football team? As you know the Ivy League is nothing more than a sports conference of 8 diverse schools. Do you have data that teachers care less about education than in 1977? While I might be skeptical you did launch automated mortgage underwriting with a 1 1/2 page memo.
I see mis-matched motivation. The faculty you define are not going to be happy with the majority of students because the majority of students you will attract will only be there for the reference letter and connection. Faculty get motivation from interested students, but your faculty will be overwhelmed by students who are not. I say this as someone whose wife and friends are professors in a large U. Students are no longer who you think they are.... in general. I see another small, elite business U.
I think this could work for business students, and for that small subpopulation I'm in favor. Most academically skilled college-age students aren't interested in business, though. This wouldn't work for STEM, except maaaaybe math, which doesn't require labs or as much in-person applied mentorship.
There is also the issue of the clientele you'd attract. You are aiming to undermine a certain ideology here. That will affect the student body at your new institution: you'll attract people who don't just disagree with the Successor Ideology, but hate it so much they don't want to ever have to deal with it, and can't stand to be around it. I'm a pretty "heterodox" guy overall, but I doubt I'd enjoy being in a room (real or virtual) with these students, who would probably bore me to tears with their Jordan Peterson rants.
Without attracting STEM students, or students interested in the humanities and social sciences "for their own sake," it would be impossible to cut into 75% of the Ivies' applications. But that is an unrealistic goal, as I think you know deep down. Something like this could still achieve important preparation of highly engaged but middle-tier students (who do exist in good numbers) *specifically for the business world* at lower cost.
I like it, but I'm not as sure about the letter recommendations working alone, I think there needs to be some sort of review or grading, but decentralized. Think Yelp for learners.
Cultural priors may be skewed. Very intriguing proposal. Is it just me, or do others remember college as a place where the party boys all majored in business? Business texts were painfully boring. And business profs were flat and dull. Economics majors were more serious, and the humanities in general is where the top teachers were and where the students studied hard and discussed lectures. I graduated along time ago, obviously. But we had a core curriculum that included the Great Books and it was very good. Alfred North Whitehead said that university is the chance to take adventures in learning. He was assuming robust humanities training. And science and math, of course. Business was an easy A, if you could stay awake during the lectures and reading. Isn't there a way to prepare students for business that doesn't simply require the study of business?
Artist Works has some elements of this vision. It's an online music school with a subscription model. The faculty are from all over the place and generally don't do it as their main job. There aren't any diplomas and definitely aren't sports teams, gardens, or a recreation center.
Part of why they may be making progress against the Ivy League is that their market is people who really want to learn music for its own sake, generally not as a core career goal. These students are motivated to attend classes, and their goals don't fit into a four-year window of time.
Flipping that around, it will be harder to dislodge the conventional university as a first step on certain career ladders. To compete in that area, would probably take something like a degree, because there really are jobs where the people who are conventionally educated run circles around the people who just learn on the job. That stuff can be learned outside the university, but an employer needs an easy way to know the candidate has done these things--especially if the employer is not themselves an expert in what they're hiring for.
“..a factor limiting the size of the market for an education experience that does not include sports teams, social activities, and other non-academic attractions..”
Would seen both strategic and essential that to displace the current default (which offers these like a bundled media package from the cable companies) - to “cut the cord” - alternate markets for these bundled-in services needs to be available - developed, networked, perhaps expanded. Alternate leagues, clubs, social institutions that cater to the non-academic inclinations of truly great leadership.
There's a lot I like about this. It's scalable, which is extremely important, since that means it can be initiated with minimal funding and build out from there. The basic model seems like it could be applied to essentially any academic field. It also provides an infrastructural basis for scholars to operate as independent professionals rather than dependents of large institutional bureaucracies - essentially more like law firms or fitness clubs.
The one thing I'm skeptical of is replacing grades entirely with letters of recommendation. This is overly subjective. There are numerous subjects that lend themselves to objective evaluations of student ability and subject mastery - the quantitative technical fields, in particular. My proposal would be to build out a standardized testing infrastructure that works at a highly granular level. Rather than having students write SATs or GREs at the culmination of each stage of their academic careers, such testing would evaluate mastery at the level of individual courses. This would provide employers with an objective, site-independent evaluation of student ability.
I like the idea of a NBU that expands access of education to a much larger student base at a significantly lower cost. I think some of the implementation details could be problematic:
1. It seems premature to focus on Ivy League schools — why not start with the many middle-tier schools that come close to overall tuition costs of Ivies, but nowhere near the guaranteed exit opportunities
2. Replacing credentialing altogether dramatically limits how much this model can scale; I think by letting courses be created freely, the best ones will eventually bubble up to the top. And the “credential” will be the public and transparent record of all work and discussions of a given student, demonstrating that they completed the course. This [post](https://kassen.substack.com/p/daos-as-university-replacements-a?s=r) explores this concept a bit further.
3. Requiring faculty to continuously reteach courses demands much more time than they may be willing to commit, and active weekly seminars also necessitate a synchronicity that limits who can take the course at what time
4. I think the conferences for faculty and students is a fantastic ideal, but may be more supplemental than crucial to the actual learning experience. It also introduces a lot of financial and logistical overhead. This kind of off-site meetup may be better left to unofficial organization by students and faculty, rather than core to the completion of the course
The network-based university (NBU) that you describe seems workable, but within a limited sphere. The focus seems to be workable for students interested in the private business sector, although I imagine the model could be expanded to include students interested in other "estates" in society. (Could this work for divinity students?)
The exclusion of extra-curricular activities would be a significant drawback. I have numerous classmates from college who found their passions and careers through extracurricular activities. A professional singer spent time putting on small plays and musicals and still works on Broadway in administration but was not a music major. The head of a major performing arts organization in NYC who has produced numerous Broadway shows also spent time in college putting on small plays and musicals but did not major in the drama school. Numerous athletes learned leadership skills playing D-1 sports under significant time constraints on and off the field. Several classmates pursued careers in journalism after working on and leading the college newspaper - a daily publication that was and is entirely student run and organized as a corporation independent of the university. Perhaps college is different nowadays in ways that dilute the value of such (organized) extracurricular activities, but I'd need to be convinced of that.
I fear all the commenters have treated this idea with excessive deference. The problem with this idea is that it lacks serious motivation.
"This culture’s ever-increasing hostility toward markets and free expression has become toxic."
The fact that you don't like the politics of some portion of the Ivy Leagues doesn't mean that you have a good reason to, or the ability to, replace them.
The idea is a non-starter because it misunderstands the issue of student motivation and the way it interacts with educational institutions. It misunderstands the issue of faculty motivation. And it badly underestimates the importance of faculty professionalism. (No, hobbyist professors won't do.)
Not the main point of your article, but "Just as Facebook need not provide an optimal experience to remain dominant in social networking" is no longer true given the ever increasing market share of new players in the space like Snapchat and TikTok. This is one reason for Meta's recent stock decline compared with Google, who is still having a monopoly in online search.
The best way to get this off the ground would be as a supplement to what existing universities offer: Get the quality up high enough, sign contracts with SUNY and such, and let them act as the car dealers who resell your cars. Their students would get SUNY credit hours and SUNY would pay for the prestige of being able to offer specialty courses that they don't now have.
Re: "enable students to learn remotely, while providing for sufficient in-person contact to bond with other students and with faculty."
Can occasional conferences provide sufficient in-person contact, compared to the Ivy model (selective, residential college campus)?
Your model places great hope in conferences. Have you attended a large conference lately?
I teach elective seminars at a fancy college, about topics that students and employers alike find intriguing, mainly around case studies in quirky orgs, markets, behaviors: "Mafia," "College," "Sports," "Prohibitions," "Internship with Seminar: Behavior in Organizations," and "Internship with Seminar: Normative Analysis of Organizations." I use these topics as vehicles to introduce undergrads to what you call cultural analysis (interdisciplinary, mainly qualitative social science). Thanks to the pandemic shock, I have taught these courses also online.
Some field observations, in no particular order of importance:
Even well-motivated undergrads have difficulty avoiding distraction during online seminar meetings. By contrast, they are on task during in-person seminars.
Even well-motivated undergrads have difficulty achieving steady application in courses that meet only once a week. Therefore, I schedule my seminars MWF for an hour, instead of once a week for three hours.
Ambitious undergrads care plenty about grades ("Grade me, damn it!"), but care much more about peer perception in a seminar. Therefore, I place more weight on seminar presentations and debates -- i.e., student performance on stage with an audience of peers, presenting, persuading, responding, and helping to manage discussion -- than on papers and projects outside of class. Every student readily meets with me for a tutorial a week before doing a seminar presentation or debate, and sends draft slides for timely feedback and guidance; but few students meet with me to brainstorm about papers, or to send drafts of papers for timely guidance.
Student-athletes experience hierarchy (coach/captain/players), teamwork, objective individual performance metrics (player stats), and objective organizational performance metrics (wins/losses), all in a general context of voluntary cooperation to compete within established rules of a game. This sounds a lot like corporations and markets. By contrast, academic production is more solitary. One might imagine that participation in team sports would have a comparative advantage in educating youths for the workplace mix of hierarchy, teamwork, competition, metrics, and org goals. However, as far as I can tell, transfer of learning usually fails to occur, from sports team to the seminar or to the workplace. Student-athletes rarely relate to professors, fellow students, managers, or workplace colleagues, and attendant 'I in team' issues, as they relate to coach, captain, and sports team.
In real-world decision contexts -- for example, jury trials, corporate policy-making, or pitches for venture capital -- persuasion by argument and by evidence usually occurs on stage, though verbal presentation, rather than through persuasive writing. Again, seminars, organized around presentations and debates, largely in person, have an edge in education.
The thrust of your model is to provide an alternative to the Ivies. There is indeed much room and need for improvement in elite education. And the decentralized, entrepreneurial model is attractive. Might a bigger payoff arise by developing alternatives to college altogether for the average youth? One example might be radical vouchers (or philanthropic vouchers) for experiments in human-capital formation via apprenticeships, internships, training programs, and the like.
What about NBU's football team? As you know the Ivy League is nothing more than a sports conference of 8 diverse schools. Do you have data that teachers care less about education than in 1977? While I might be skeptical you did launch automated mortgage underwriting with a 1 1/2 page memo.
Good luck with this new endeavor.
I see mis-matched motivation. The faculty you define are not going to be happy with the majority of students because the majority of students you will attract will only be there for the reference letter and connection. Faculty get motivation from interested students, but your faculty will be overwhelmed by students who are not. I say this as someone whose wife and friends are professors in a large U. Students are no longer who you think they are.... in general. I see another small, elite business U.
I think this could work for business students, and for that small subpopulation I'm in favor. Most academically skilled college-age students aren't interested in business, though. This wouldn't work for STEM, except maaaaybe math, which doesn't require labs or as much in-person applied mentorship.
There is also the issue of the clientele you'd attract. You are aiming to undermine a certain ideology here. That will affect the student body at your new institution: you'll attract people who don't just disagree with the Successor Ideology, but hate it so much they don't want to ever have to deal with it, and can't stand to be around it. I'm a pretty "heterodox" guy overall, but I doubt I'd enjoy being in a room (real or virtual) with these students, who would probably bore me to tears with their Jordan Peterson rants.
Without attracting STEM students, or students interested in the humanities and social sciences "for their own sake," it would be impossible to cut into 75% of the Ivies' applications. But that is an unrealistic goal, as I think you know deep down. Something like this could still achieve important preparation of highly engaged but middle-tier students (who do exist in good numbers) *specifically for the business world* at lower cost.
I like it, but I'm not as sure about the letter recommendations working alone, I think there needs to be some sort of review or grading, but decentralized. Think Yelp for learners.
Cultural priors may be skewed. Very intriguing proposal. Is it just me, or do others remember college as a place where the party boys all majored in business? Business texts were painfully boring. And business profs were flat and dull. Economics majors were more serious, and the humanities in general is where the top teachers were and where the students studied hard and discussed lectures. I graduated along time ago, obviously. But we had a core curriculum that included the Great Books and it was very good. Alfred North Whitehead said that university is the chance to take adventures in learning. He was assuming robust humanities training. And science and math, of course. Business was an easy A, if you could stay awake during the lectures and reading. Isn't there a way to prepare students for business that doesn't simply require the study of business?
The time frames are too short by a factor of ten.
What about (a) labs and (b) access to federal loans and grants?
Artist Works has some elements of this vision. It's an online music school with a subscription model. The faculty are from all over the place and generally don't do it as their main job. There aren't any diplomas and definitely aren't sports teams, gardens, or a recreation center.
Part of why they may be making progress against the Ivy League is that their market is people who really want to learn music for its own sake, generally not as a core career goal. These students are motivated to attend classes, and their goals don't fit into a four-year window of time.
Flipping that around, it will be harder to dislodge the conventional university as a first step on certain career ladders. To compete in that area, would probably take something like a degree, because there really are jobs where the people who are conventionally educated run circles around the people who just learn on the job. That stuff can be learned outside the university, but an employer needs an easy way to know the candidate has done these things--especially if the employer is not themselves an expert in what they're hiring for.
“..a factor limiting the size of the market for an education experience that does not include sports teams, social activities, and other non-academic attractions..”
Would seen both strategic and essential that to displace the current default (which offers these like a bundled media package from the cable companies) - to “cut the cord” - alternate markets for these bundled-in services needs to be available - developed, networked, perhaps expanded. Alternate leagues, clubs, social institutions that cater to the non-academic inclinations of truly great leadership.
There's a lot I like about this. It's scalable, which is extremely important, since that means it can be initiated with minimal funding and build out from there. The basic model seems like it could be applied to essentially any academic field. It also provides an infrastructural basis for scholars to operate as independent professionals rather than dependents of large institutional bureaucracies - essentially more like law firms or fitness clubs.
The one thing I'm skeptical of is replacing grades entirely with letters of recommendation. This is overly subjective. There are numerous subjects that lend themselves to objective evaluations of student ability and subject mastery - the quantitative technical fields, in particular. My proposal would be to build out a standardized testing infrastructure that works at a highly granular level. Rather than having students write SATs or GREs at the culmination of each stage of their academic careers, such testing would evaluate mastery at the level of individual courses. This would provide employers with an objective, site-independent evaluation of student ability.
I lay that out here:
https://barsoom.substack.com/p/how-to-kill-the-incompetocracy
Such infrastructure could be very easily combined with the network-centric open source seminar system you proposed in this essay.
I like the idea of a NBU that expands access of education to a much larger student base at a significantly lower cost. I think some of the implementation details could be problematic:
1. It seems premature to focus on Ivy League schools — why not start with the many middle-tier schools that come close to overall tuition costs of Ivies, but nowhere near the guaranteed exit opportunities
2. Replacing credentialing altogether dramatically limits how much this model can scale; I think by letting courses be created freely, the best ones will eventually bubble up to the top. And the “credential” will be the public and transparent record of all work and discussions of a given student, demonstrating that they completed the course. This [post](https://kassen.substack.com/p/daos-as-university-replacements-a?s=r) explores this concept a bit further.
3. Requiring faculty to continuously reteach courses demands much more time than they may be willing to commit, and active weekly seminars also necessitate a synchronicity that limits who can take the course at what time
4. I think the conferences for faculty and students is a fantastic ideal, but may be more supplemental than crucial to the actual learning experience. It also introduces a lot of financial and logistical overhead. This kind of off-site meetup may be better left to unofficial organization by students and faculty, rather than core to the completion of the course
The network-based university (NBU) that you describe seems workable, but within a limited sphere. The focus seems to be workable for students interested in the private business sector, although I imagine the model could be expanded to include students interested in other "estates" in society. (Could this work for divinity students?)
The exclusion of extra-curricular activities would be a significant drawback. I have numerous classmates from college who found their passions and careers through extracurricular activities. A professional singer spent time putting on small plays and musicals and still works on Broadway in administration but was not a music major. The head of a major performing arts organization in NYC who has produced numerous Broadway shows also spent time in college putting on small plays and musicals but did not major in the drama school. Numerous athletes learned leadership skills playing D-1 sports under significant time constraints on and off the field. Several classmates pursued careers in journalism after working on and leading the college newspaper - a daily publication that was and is entirely student run and organized as a corporation independent of the university. Perhaps college is different nowadays in ways that dilute the value of such (organized) extracurricular activities, but I'd need to be convinced of that.
I fear all the commenters have treated this idea with excessive deference. The problem with this idea is that it lacks serious motivation.
"This culture’s ever-increasing hostility toward markets and free expression has become toxic."
The fact that you don't like the politics of some portion of the Ivy Leagues doesn't mean that you have a good reason to, or the ability to, replace them.
The idea is a non-starter because it misunderstands the issue of student motivation and the way it interacts with educational institutions. It misunderstands the issue of faculty motivation. And it badly underestimates the importance of faculty professionalism. (No, hobbyist professors won't do.)
Not the main point of your article, but "Just as Facebook need not provide an optimal experience to remain dominant in social networking" is no longer true given the ever increasing market share of new players in the space like Snapchat and TikTok. This is one reason for Meta's recent stock decline compared with Google, who is still having a monopoly in online search.
The best way to get this off the ground would be as a supplement to what existing universities offer: Get the quality up high enough, sign contracts with SUNY and such, and let them act as the car dealers who resell your cars. Their students would get SUNY credit hours and SUNY would pay for the prestige of being able to offer specialty courses that they don't now have.