To an extent, this already occurs with Harvard and HES as well as LSE and the University of London International distance degree programs that LSE leads. Even more so at the grad level where you see a bunch of elite and respectable unis offering cheap online degrees. An HES master’s and UIUC MBA costs much less than one year of a FT in-person degree. GTech and Texas offer CS master’s for 10K or less.
I do see it tough for non-elite LACs and directionals to survive. Sciences with labs and various arts (like theatre) may still have to meet physically somewhere. Sports (other than esports) can’t be played online. But a lot of classes could move online as well as scale and we likely will see disaggregation between education/teaching, the social experience, and the certification.
LSE did this over a century ago, essentially just certifying via testing.
Nobel winner Ronald Coase earned his distance bachelor’s that way.
From my point of view, students go to college for basically three inter-related reasons:
To earn specific job qualifications (RN, teaching certificate, accounting degree/CPA exam, etc.
To earn a pedigree. Some fields like finance, consulting, teaching at an Ivy League school basically require an Ivy or Ivy-equivalent pedigree to even get in the door. You can be a brilliant finance wizard or brilliant History PhD from Eastern Washington University but you aren't likely to get an interview at Goldman Sachs or Harvard. Likewise that law degree from UNLV isn't likely to land you a clerkship on the Supreme Court.
To actually learn things. There are some students who just want to study physics or archaeology or ancient Greek. To make a living at it you probably need to enter academia.
For jobs that require certifications (such as teaching or nursing) I doubt an elite Ivy education is of much use. And much of those jobs can’t be done online anyway as they require lots of on-the-job practice. I can tell you from experience that an Ivy league degree doesn’t carry much cachet if you are sitting in an interview for a teaching job and all the administrators and teachers on the hiring committee all attended the local state schools.
For jobs that require an elite pedigree, I’m not sure an open-application online Ivy degree is going to serve the purpose. If Harvard enrolls 100,000 freshman who can fog a mirror then what elite sorting purpose does Harvard serve? And if they only admit 2,000 online students per year to their online academy then I"m not sure how it scales.
And for STEM jobs like engineering, life sciences, medicine, chemistry, etc. Online learning is of limited utility. You still need expensive labs. To cite a current example. How does one do virology research without expensive gene sequencing equipment, secure bio-containment facilities, electron microscopes and so forth. Some basic coursework could, of course, be done online. But certainly not all of it in STEM fields. Do you want a neurosurgeon who has only read about the procedure online?
Being part of the elite is not just an academic construct, but also a social construct. So while elite schools may be in the future largely online, that social component will still play a huge part in deciding who’s who in America. It will still be about getting into the right school, or the right eating club, or the right final club. I personally think we may see greater, not lesser, snobbism. And it will have very little to do with academics.
@katliamom, I agree up to a point. More stratification (though possibly by other means) at least until something like the French Revolution comes or 90% tax rates return.
@Camasite:
“For jobs that require an elite pedigree, I’m not sure an open-application online Ivy degree is going to serve the purpose. If Harvard enrolls 100,000 freshman who can fog a mirror then what elite sorting purpose does Harvard serve? And if they only admit 2,000 online students per year to their online academy then I"m not sure how it scales.”
They could still sort. Just not at entrance. LSE has done this for a long time. They lead a bunch of the distance/online social science degrees offered by the University of London International (basically means they send you the course material and grade tests while you self-study or get instruction at some local institution that teaches the LSE curriculum). The marks you get (1st Class Honours, 2:1, 2:2, etc.) come down to yearly tests that you take at a local testing site. LSE says they grade the U of L tests as rigorously as they do their own undergrads.
LSE offers scholarships to their master’s programs to a handful of the folks who do the very best out of all who complete the degree from around the world. Those folks tend to end up on bank trading desks in the City (of London). The total University of London International bachelor’s degree costs about $10K or less.
MIT actually does this too with some of their micromasters. People take some online classes. The ones who get the top grades in the micromasters program are invited to come to MIT for a year to complete a full MIT master’s program (that would otherwise take 2 years) and earn an MIT degree. Some non-selective schools take the MIT micromasters credits as transfer credits for their master’s programs.
That’s why there will always be high demand for residential elite colleges. You aren’t going to meet the right people from the right families by attending a 500 person zoom lecture from your living room.
If we don’t have a major pandemic every several years.
If this is the new normal (and with ever more human encroachment on wilderness and an ever more interconnected globe, it could be), dropping $50K+/year tuition (soon to be half a million for an on-site 4 year degree though tuition for 4 years will be $300K soon at some schools) for Zoom classes for close to half your college career will start to sound ridiculous.
If the elitism goes away then so does the reason to apply for many. The elites are not going to give their value away by going solely online or discounting their degrees. While there are many Executive MBAs and executive education, they are not going to get you into McKinsey. People who have the pedigree vet each other. They can’t have an online and in-person degree on the same footing.
There will definitely be shakes ups, but my money would be on the second and third tier schools which charge high fees relative to their value. This is where the parents are going to really reassess paying the higher fees. Students on FA might do a different calculus. But give this a few bad years and the entire educational basis will need to shift. There is a lot of fluff in useless admin in colleges. Not as many professors who actually teach as their clientele would like. I’m looking forward to seeing changes.
@Happytimes2001, there will always be elitism but how the stratification occurs may change. As I mentioned, U of L International students (entire bachelor’s is distance and costs $10K or less, depending on the exchange rate, low admission requirements) who have done well have advanced far in life. Probably because the Brits with their empire are use to pulling talent from everywhere (a lot of unis in both the UK and British Commonwealth started out as teaching centers instructing U of L correspondence courses).
There isn’t high demand for elite colleges now – a tiny fraction of students attend them today – and there won’t be anytime soon… not with 15% unemployment.
And if you get the right degree, it won’t matter whether you attended 500 person zoom lectures. Which is why San Jose State University sends so many of its graduates to lucrative jobs in Silicon Valley.
An elite product is by definition inaccessible to most people. Also, many students (most?) are not suited to complete online delivery of curricula. Online education evangelists are way too confident, in my opinion. One thing this crisis has demonstrated is that students hunger for in-person attention and collegiality, and most don’t believe that online delivery, however expert or well-designed, is an adequate replacement.
I found that some of my students adapted well to online learning, and they contributed more on discussion boards than they did in person in class. These students were the socially anxious yet diligent. However, others simply lost their motivation without the structure, accountability, and communication of a face-to-face meeting. It’s a matter of temperament, not intelligence.
Will the cost structure of higher ed have to change? Absolutely. However, quality online teaching will not be cheap. If it’s done correctly, it’s every bit as labor-intensive, if not more so, than teaching in person. For example, this semester starting on March 10, I had to record my lectures, listen to them, edit them, change them, etc. before posting, instead of swanning into a classroom and performing live. This preparation (on material I already knew) was very time-consuming, and far exceeded my commuting and prep time in regular days. Just as musicians will attest, live performance is very different from recording. Teaching is a performance art, and performers adjust to the live audience.
BTW, as for “discounting their degrees”, I find that many people don’t understand how much higher ed is a business. You can argue that (filthy rich) Princeton and (principled) Caltech don’t. Virtually everyone else has degree programs that are cash cows (that includes virtually every EMBA program) or isn’t very tough to enter because it’s seen as serving the community (all it takes to enter a HES degree program is to get a few B’s in a few classes).
UIUC offers their online MBA for about $20K total. GTech’s online CS master’s is less than $10K total.
BTW, I believe they did a study and the GTech online CS master’s grads were just as successful in their careers as the GTech onsite CS master’s grads a few years after graduation.
@NJSue: I doubt that. UIUC actually shut down their FT and PT MBA programs because they were money-losers. They’ve figured out a way to make the economics of their online degree program work.
@NJSue: I don’t know the details, but UIUC shut down their FT and PT MBA programs in order to devote more resources to their online MBA program, so I’m sure it makes economic sense for them.
As for students knowing how to be students: Yes that is the standard expectation in higher ed in most of the world. ETH Zurich is one of the top STEM unis in the world (it’s essentially the MIT of Europe). Not terribly tough for Swiss students to get into, but tough to graduate from and no hand-holding.
UMich has graduated more students than some small countries and states have total people (over 600K and counting), so not exactly exclusive.
Yet, while not an Ivy (though @Alexandre would tell you that the student experience there is similar to the student experience at Cornell, which is an Ivy), it is seen as elite in many fields.
Waseda in Japan has graduated even more students. It is seen as one of the top unis in Japan and one of the top 2 privates (along with Keio; the Waseda-Keio rivalry is akin to the Harvard-Yale rivalry here).
Another thing too is that once a degree is completely online, a school wouldn’t have to worry about geography or immigration/visa laws. Many of the Ivies/equivalents already have online/distance grad programs that they charge a premium for.
I think the first “elite” schools that offer completely online undergrad degree programs will be some of the publics that have a good international reputation in STEM. GTech and UIUC, etc. Maybe UMich/Cal/UCLA. Especially if immigration laws deter Internationals from actually coming to the US.
Guess it depends on what you consider as elite. I have seen that graduates of these very top schools vet each other. There are many on CC who refer to graduates being equally successful, purely on the basis of economic means. But there are many (perhaps fading) intangibles that a hyper-elite degree confers. So while technical degrees are often substituted ( since they are based on math and science and there aren’t enough people to fill all the jobs); Try to get a job in Investment banking with an online degree.
I’m not in favor of the existing status quo. But I think Americans buy into the names and the whole bit even if they can’t afford certain colleges. So the downward pressure on prices and the need for new “offerings” won’t be like a normal product.
I think many who are in the normal stream of colleges ( the 85% of schools which are not CC and not Ivy/MIT) are going to have a hard time selling their product for the current price.