CU is getting it right
Published in the Boulder Daily Camera, 2/22/18
Automation that began with the industrial age has led us to robotic systems that increasingly render human physical labor irrelevant to economic activity. Today, artificial intelligence is finally getting, well, intelligent. I ask Amazon's Alexa what stupid things Donald Trump said today and she tells me. Any minute now, she'll take my order in a restaurant noting my culinary peculiarities and probably offering a touch of humor.
Keeping people employed in future American job markets is going to require more skills than we can teach students in high school. Whether we realize it or not, we are counting on post-secondary educational institutions to provide more young adults with the tools they'll need to stay gainfully employed. This means that American academics need to figure out how to get more people into and through higher education institutions, and soon.
Recent public debates on higher education have given scant attention to improving its core mission of teaching. Take all the energy we've spent making universities beacons of enlightened sexuality between young adults at fraternity parties. Or, how about academia's hurricane of politically correct thinking that has yielded little aside from some amusing Saturday Night Live routines and a backlash that helped elect a politically incorrect president? These academic inquisitions did nothing to better enable colleges to prepare future generations for the economic world that awaits them.Recently, however, a very real problem has come to the forefront that represents an existential threat to higher education in America — the cost of college is getting too expensive for most American families.
College costs have been rising relative to American household income for a long time. In 1971, tuition costs at state schools consumed 5 percent of the average annual American household income with private schools consuming 20 percent. By 2015, these figures had more than tripled. Seen another way, in 1971, putting two kids through four years of a private college cost about 1.5 years of a family's total income. Today, educating these two kids will take 5 years of a family's income. That's a big increase that is significantly affecting education choices for middle- and lower-income Americans. It is not sustainable.
So, the question we face now is, "can we lower costs by making colleges more efficient at educating students?" Today, much as it was in the Middle Ages, most students are taught through personal association and contact with the faculty who are there to pass on their wisdom. It's a good teaching model that has served us well for centuries, but it's very expensive. Can colleges effectively deploy some of the same robotics, media, and artificial intelligence technology that are making the rest of the American economy more efficient?
The University of Colorado is working as hard as any education institution in America to find the answer to that question.
CU's commitment to more efficient higher education has its roots in 2012 when institutions from Stanford to CU began developing and making available massive open online courses (MOOCs). All of a sudden, students could, at little or no cost, access lectures and course materials from some of the best educators at American universities.
But, as the educational opportunities of MOOCs blossomed, many universities declined to award credit towards degrees to students who didn't spend time on their campus learning the same material — old-school thinking at its worst.
Not CU. In 2015, CU launched the University of Colorado Connect online education initiative to integrate and expand its online course offerings. Today, CU offers 12 undergraduate and 20 graduate degrees entirely online, reflecting commitment to the belief that a college degree should represent educational attainment, not time served on campus.
A few weeks ago, CU broke some serious new ground when it announced a fully online masters degree in electrical engineering. Electrical engineering is one of the most valuable degrees in America and the material a student must master includes hard quantitative analysis and complex problem-solving. If CU can crack this nut with online education, a future where higher education becomes widely available and far less expensive is in sight. When students can obtain engineering degrees without having to live on a college campus and spend many hours consuming educators' time, cost might stop being the primary driver of who can have what kind of college education.
American higher education will always need places where apprentices can be trained by the masters. But we are finding that many Americans can get the education they need in more cost-effective ways. CU is stepping boldly down that path and forging the way towards future learning.
Automation that began with the industrial age has led us to robotic systems that increasingly render human physical labor irrelevant to economic activity. Today, artificial intelligence is finally getting, well, intelligent. I ask Amazon's Alexa what stupid things Donald Trump said today and she tells me. Any minute now, she'll take my order in a restaurant noting my culinary peculiarities and probably offering a touch of humor.
Keeping people employed in future American job markets is going to require more skills than we can teach students in high school. Whether we realize it or not, we are counting on post-secondary educational institutions to provide more young adults with the tools they'll need to stay gainfully employed. This means that American academics need to figure out how to get more people into and through higher education institutions, and soon.
Recent public debates on higher education have given scant attention to improving its core mission of teaching. Take all the energy we've spent making universities beacons of enlightened sexuality between young adults at fraternity parties. Or, how about academia's hurricane of politically correct thinking that has yielded little aside from some amusing Saturday Night Live routines and a backlash that helped elect a politically incorrect president? These academic inquisitions did nothing to better enable colleges to prepare future generations for the economic world that awaits them.Recently, however, a very real problem has come to the forefront that represents an existential threat to higher education in America — the cost of college is getting too expensive for most American families.
College costs have been rising relative to American household income for a long time. In 1971, tuition costs at state schools consumed 5 percent of the average annual American household income with private schools consuming 20 percent. By 2015, these figures had more than tripled. Seen another way, in 1971, putting two kids through four years of a private college cost about 1.5 years of a family's total income. Today, educating these two kids will take 5 years of a family's income. That's a big increase that is significantly affecting education choices for middle- and lower-income Americans. It is not sustainable.
So, the question we face now is, "can we lower costs by making colleges more efficient at educating students?" Today, much as it was in the Middle Ages, most students are taught through personal association and contact with the faculty who are there to pass on their wisdom. It's a good teaching model that has served us well for centuries, but it's very expensive. Can colleges effectively deploy some of the same robotics, media, and artificial intelligence technology that are making the rest of the American economy more efficient?
The University of Colorado is working as hard as any education institution in America to find the answer to that question.
CU's commitment to more efficient higher education has its roots in 2012 when institutions from Stanford to CU began developing and making available massive open online courses (MOOCs). All of a sudden, students could, at little or no cost, access lectures and course materials from some of the best educators at American universities.
But, as the educational opportunities of MOOCs blossomed, many universities declined to award credit towards degrees to students who didn't spend time on their campus learning the same material — old-school thinking at its worst.
Not CU. In 2015, CU launched the University of Colorado Connect online education initiative to integrate and expand its online course offerings. Today, CU offers 12 undergraduate and 20 graduate degrees entirely online, reflecting commitment to the belief that a college degree should represent educational attainment, not time served on campus.
A few weeks ago, CU broke some serious new ground when it announced a fully online masters degree in electrical engineering. Electrical engineering is one of the most valuable degrees in America and the material a student must master includes hard quantitative analysis and complex problem-solving. If CU can crack this nut with online education, a future where higher education becomes widely available and far less expensive is in sight. When students can obtain engineering degrees without having to live on a college campus and spend many hours consuming educators' time, cost might stop being the primary driver of who can have what kind of college education.
American higher education will always need places where apprentices can be trained by the masters. But we are finding that many Americans can get the education they need in more cost-effective ways. CU is stepping boldly down that path and forging the way towards future learning.
