Yeah, I get that we are talking about who bears the burden of the costs, but isn't there another factor to the "costs?" He writes: Recently, we have seen the emergence of online education and distance learning creeping in to the mainstream academia. But it's only creeping. I would think that the market is ripe for a serious institution to fully embrace an extremely low cost version of their education model. A sort of Armani Exchange degree. Get a world class education for $5k a year. It's coming, perhaps it's already here, I have no idea. But my guess is it would already be here in full if the textbook manufacturers/publishers didn't have strong lobbies. If the professors weren't clinging to tenure and a justification for why in person lectures are valuable. Like the medical market, there is a lot of "waste" in thick margins, with little to no competition.If by “college costs,” you mean institutional costs, then that is calling for lower overall educational spending per student. That makes sense of course to the extent that there is institutional waste, i.e. spending that is not actually achieving some important educational goal.
The word "waste" in there is a very subjective one. People may think having tenured professors at $150k a year is "wasteful" at times, others may think having an educational infrastructure geared around "text+books+" that cost in excess of $200 a piece as wasteful. Some may think that having a professor give the same lecture every semester in person is wasteful. There will be others that find justifications for all of those things too.
I do think that this distance degree is fast coming, but I don't think you can get a 'world class' education from it. Perhaps I was spoiled, but most of my lectures were from professors that knew my name, and we had extensive dialogs during those lectures. My class sizes after my second year probably averaged 15 students. I have had 'lecture hall' classes, and I think those are pretty similar to distance learning. It's educational, but I wouldn't call it 'world class', no matter what campus it takes place at. That said, I agree that many versions of the college education could be replaced by distance learning. In fact they should be, because students are paying far too much for what they get.
There's not doubt that one of the greatest aspects of the classroom setting is the interaction between students and between students and teacher. How can distance learning recreate this? Would you have needed to be in the room with the prof to have experienced what you did to the fullest extent? Could that prof have "known your name" even in a distance learning environment via "chat" or "hangout" sessions?
I completely agree with all of this. (Although, anyone who still pays money for their textbooks is frankly stupid. If you're living under a rock and don't understand how the internet works, ask someone for help.) The evidence that we're turning the corner is there. Certain few industries hire based on skill rather than degree. That's the future. The future is learning what you need to as you need it, from free or very cheap online resources (some of which already exist). Obviously, many people, starting with the millionaires who sit on the board of directors of basically every major university in America, do not like this one bit -- but until they cut costs they will lose this battle inevitably.