The Mission

What are Universities for? Humans are tool using primates. What kind of tool is a University, and what sets it apart from the other tools in the box.

There seems to be two answers to this. One is Utilitarian, what we use Universities for, and the other Idealistic, their self defined mission. To the utilitarian, we chiefly use universities to educate us and test our mettle so we can compete with the all the other tool using primates for jobs, spouses and so forth. At a larger scale, we also use them as general purpose knowledge factories, coming up with useful tools for our future and insights into our past.  I've written from this viewpoint extensively before and am somewhat partial to it, so I won't repeat myself.

The Ideal, as I understand it, is that Universites create and spread learning. 'Where Finbarr taught, let Munster learn" as goes the motto of my alma mater. By research they learn things no one knows yet. By teaching, they help students learn things they don't know yet. It's a passionate, messianic mission, to be a flamethrower of knowledge, setting the world ablaze.

The two answers don't really align all that well, (and both leave out other things, for the sake of clarity) but neither answer is wrong. This isn't arithmetic. The real world is messy. We can hold misaligned, conflicting ideas in our head and put them all to good use.

I was recently doing some thinking on behalf of a training company. Their mission is very different to the Universities, and very clear. They must make money. If the owner felt his capital and talents would be more profitable making biscuits instead of training, then to the kitchen he would go. Profit, in the near and longer term, is the measure of success. It's lovely, sure, that everyone enjoys the work and learns things, but that is secondary. The profit makes creating and protecting something of commercial value central. You need great teaching materials, and you need to protect their copyright. You need good trainers, and you need to deliver learning in a way you can bill for. The learning is a little candle, an arc welder. Hot and bright, perhaps, but kept somewhat hidden, except for paying customers.

True Universities are not for profit. Because the language of business leaks over, their leaders often forget that. Business Minded Managers, trotting out outdated MBA speak and talking about the balance sheet rise to the top, which spawns Reactionary Idealists in the ranks, who forget the mundane, utilitarian purpose on which to which their light of learning must shine, and frown on incursions of the practical. The language and ideas of business can be a powerful tool to make Universities work better, but the bottom line is different.

One of the really great things about the open educational resources movement (OER) is that is makes sense only when you remember The Mission, and sounds insane when you think you are a business. It's like a litmus test. Do you make all your teaching material available to the general public? If you are a for profit training company, no way. If your mission is to spread learning as much as possible, then, yes, obviously. How could you not. If it isn't good enough to share, it isn't good enough to teach with. Do you publish your research in expensive journals read by the few, or make it free for all to read? If your mission is to spread learning, it's a no brainer. It has to reach the widest audience. Are you wary of putting your teaching up on Youtube? So you should be, if you are in it for profit. You would only put up a sample of the good stuff, for marketing. Not for profit? Put every last minute of it online. St. Paul would have used a creative commons licence for his letters if he had one to hand, and so should you.

Universities need to keep the lights on and pay the wages, but that's a means to an end, not the end in itself. If they could make the light of learning blaze the brighter without those things, they should. A University balance sheet belongs closer to bankruptcy than any private business could bear. Training companies turn knowledge into cash. Universities turn cash into knowledge. Both should maximise the conversation ratio, using all means at their disposal, and neither should finish the year holding much stock.

The Social University

Prisons are the Universities of Crime, critics say. And yet there are no formal classes, Gotti never taught advanced Racketeering in Marion Penitentiary, and I don't imagine Bernie Madoff lecturing in Hedge Fund Management at Butner. So how are prisons so effective at turning first time crooks into hardened criminals, and what does it tell us about Universities?

Universities and Prisons are both social institutions, where peer to peer interaction with your fellow inmates, and the overall environment exert a far stronger affect than often distant, formal interactions with the staff.

Universities spend most of their time, money and staff focusing on the teaching experience, but a disproportionate amount of the influence a University has on it's inmates happens outside of lecture hours. New undergraduates are pitched into a vast pool of people and must sink or swim. Like baby turtles stumbling towards the sea, they must find their way quickly, and relationships formed at the outset can last decades. I'm still good friends with a person I happened to be standing beside in the registration queue almost 20 years ago. Like many of my peers, I met my spouse in University.

Three or four years of University, following a schedule that is busy, but not crushing, students form deep, sustainable relationships with people who will be their spouses, colleagues and friends for decades. In the 21st century, this matters more, not less. In the old days, people would work in one job for decades, and have time to form equally deep linkages and networks. Those days are gone. People work short contracts of a year or two, they move houses and countries. Three or four years as an undergraduate may be the longest static spell in people lives until their own children start school.

The building of these social networks is of conventional tertiary education's 'killer apps'. The capacity to draw large groups of young people together for extended periods of time is something competitors cannot do. High intensity programmes, compressing a four year degree into two frantic years are certainly possible. They'll be cheaper, and perhaps even better academically, but no one attending them is going to have time to talk to each other, let along make friends with them, get drunk with them, or fall in love with them. Online programmes can't compete at all in building this kind of social capital. Even in the Facebook age, humans are still monkeys in jeans. We need to be able to make eye contact, shake hands, slap backs. We cannot love those we cannot smell.

Just like prisons, peer pressure in Universities reinforces and amplifies behavior patterns far more effectively than the staff can. People with at least moderate academic inclinations enter the system and slush around in it for a while. Those who cannot sustain it are removed from the pile, they flunk out, cut away and shunned from the social group they were only halfway through building. For every one that falls away, another dozen take note and align a bit better with the expected patterns of behaviour for proto doctors, engineers or whatever. The final product is both distilled by losses and aligned by peer pressure.

Conventional Universities ignore all this at their peril. Student groups often get the tail end of the budget and attention. There are bright points, most Universities fete their sports teams, but that's only a tiny fraction of the student body. Little thought is given on how to structure the organisation to promote building this social capital. It happens largely by accident, taken for granted. The student social experience should get equal billing with the academic experience. It's one thing the competition can't do better, faster or cheaper.

If not University, what else?

An interesting post on University Diary today about whether a degree is still worth it. The post recounts the tail of person who went back to University to get a degree, found no benefit to it in employment, and considered the four years wasted. And this was, I assume, in Ireland, where the purely financial cost incurred was low. In the US, the same exercise would have bankrupted the man, and his family.

"...sometime in 2023 she will go to University.."

Right there is a founding assumption of this blog. My little girl will go to University some day. But what if she couldn't? What if, for some reason, that door was closed. In the world we live in now, or even in 2023, what are the credible alternatives she could present to an almost certainly scowling and sceptical team of parents, aunts and uncles. Out of that 'advisory board' of 10 people, there are four (five, says one dissenter, shouted down) PhD or equivalent degrees, a bunch of Masters of one sort or another, and only one person with 'only' a primary degree (but that person has a bunch of fairly meaty professional qualifications, so we'll give him a by). What do we know about non University careers pathways? We know, and are descended from, a few farmers of the 'bog and an acre' style but that's about it, and you need a qualification to do that nowadays anyway. In a professional context, I only worked with one person without a degree. He was great, a real go to guy. He subsequently had to go back and get a degree because not having one was blocking his pathway to promotion. Good grief, you probably need a degree to run away and join the circus nowadays.

Any ideas?

Accreditation and Assessment: The Corregidor Position

Using the dominance of degree granting power to protect a Universities future is like defending Corregidor. At best, it's a holding action. At worst, it's a deadly distraction.

Corregidor, as viewers of The History Channel will know, was the Gibraltar of the Orient, protecting Manila Bay, the best natural harbour west of San Francisco, and with it, the Philippines and Americas empire on the Pacific rim. A magnificent fortress, it was thought to be able to withstand siege for six months, plenty of time for the fleet from Pearl Harbour to relieve it at leisure. Within a few minutes at Pearl Harbour, with that fleet in ruins, Corregidor's fate was sealed. It indeed fell six months later, after a long a bloody battle which tied down substantial Japanese forces. Few of the defenders lived to see VJ day.

The degree granting power of Universities is indeed a fine fortress. Degrees hold vast power over the imagination of the middle classes, a magic scroll, held like a wand by a robed graduate, to open the door of success and respectability. They provide employers a handy shortcut to assess the diligence and knowledge of potential hire. They are difficult to earn, thus filtering out students without the brains, resource and good fortune. A degree is a valuable thing.

It's a good business to be in, making graduates. If you are an academic and don't think education is a business, the next Pegasus back to Fairyland leaves at four. it might not be a for profit business, but students, or taxpayers on their behalf, spend a heap of good money to get graduates. It's a transaction. That makes it a business. If you don't think  it should be a business, do it for free.

 There three big barriers to entry for a potential competitor who might try to get into the graduate making line.

First, the brand. The University of So and So has been around for a long time, and will have build up a certain reputation among employers and potential students. It takes a long time to build that up. If I decided to open a university in the morning (The University of Rob), however good it was, it would still take me years, and a vast expenditure or marketing and public relations propoganda to build that brand. Potential students are often steered by parents and career guidance teachers who'll be a clear quarter century out of touch. Employers are more fickle, but still lean on degrees from places they've heard of to filter the candidates into the slush pile. The brand (or, reputation, if you don't like commercial language) is the most valuable asset a University has.

Second, the infrastructure. The conventional degree setup is expensive to run. Lecture halls must be maintained, academics fed and watered, quads mowed. Students spend four years knocking about the campus jumping through one hoop or another, and that costs money. So long as people expect a degree to look like four years physical time on campus, it's going to be expensive to do that. If I wanted to open a university in the morning, I'd have buy some expensive real estate, do a lot of building work and hire a great many academics. I can't just put up lots of content on Youtube like the Khan Academy and expect people to take me seriously, no matter how good my material is.

Finally, there is the state sponsored monopoly. The state reserves the power to decide who can and cannot hand out degrees, or even who can call themselves a University. The University of Rob would soon find it's letterbox full of troubling legal correspondence.

This is the weakest link.One keen populist or neo-liberal politian, one piece of legislation, and it's gone. If I ran the circus (after the Revolution, you know) I would sweep this away with the stroke of a pen, just to see what would happen.

What would happen, exactly?

First up, a whole bunch of private providers would ride over the hills. Most of them would be cowboys. The natural reaction would be to put some kind of bureaucracy in place to regulate exactly what size chunk of cognitive transformation a Batcholers, or Masters degree is (How would we measure congnitive transformation, exactly?). Adding quality assurance system is tempting, but why not just let people get their learning in module (or smaller blocks) and have graduates and employers rate how useful each unit was. Things like Tripadvisor work fine for a weekend in a hotel, which is about as long and expensive as a single module might be. Cowboys with turkey courses would soon find themselves on the receiving end of poor reviews and hard pressed to win further business. Existing institutions may find some surprises, good and bad, in the cold light of day. Students could go as they please, learning what they need, wherever it is best, where and when they need it. Employers might learn they don't care so much about the broad education, they want people who have done this or that unit. Newspaper commentators may feel it undermines society. Society is of course, not prevented from subsiding the process, just as it does today.

Universities shouldn't rely on their degree granting power to survive, no more than the defenders of Corregidor could rely on the Pacific Fleet. A state sponsored monopoly is no secure long term foundation for any enterprise, especially in a time when other changes have the potential to strongly erode the incumbents position. Alas, the Tertiary Sector will have no Pearl Harbour. The Edupunks shall not fly over the hill one day yelling Banzai, to wake Universities from their complacency. The collapse will come slowly, as first two planks of their value wear away, decade after decade, until they rest more and more on the monopoly of degree granting power. That too, will in time become irrelevant.

Corregidor was eventually retaken, of course, in a war that ended using tactics and technologies unimagined when it was constructed. It was not rebuilt.

Photo: Ruins at Corregidor, by Jepster via Flickr.

Music, Newspapers, Universities: The Domino Theory

Much of the current thinking about the future of Universities rests on supposed similarities between Education and other sectors who core product is knowledge or information, like music, or newspapers. Many of these similarities are entirely superficial, and that idea that Universities will suffer (or enjoy?) the same fate is not a given.

The idea goes like this. First, the web made the marginal cost of distributing information effectively nil. Industries whose core product is information, such as the music industry, were first against the wall the revolution came. For music, Napster was the first wave, and the old music industry fought back with law. In time, iTunes made the model work, and now internet downloads are the main sales channels, old fashioned music shops are emply lots on the high street, and successful musicians and garage bands can increasingly 'go indie' sell direct online, and disregard the conventional mill of the record company.

The same thing is happening to newspapers. eBay, Craigslist and Google hollowed out the advertising revenue. Individual website and bloggers bypassed newspapers and spoke directly to readers on the subjects they cared about, publishing instantly. The idea of an omnibus daily newspaper, covering everything from world news to local sport, read by all, is increasingly an anacronism. Why pay for superficial coverage of everything when what you really just want is the financial news from Singapore, or in depth coverage of Canadian Lacrosse?

The same logic is applied to the third domino, Education. Why go to a general university and hear a third rate lecturers give an indifferent presentation of material from a 20 year old textbook, when you can download great lectures from Stanford, Harvard and MIT. Why settle for a lecturer who wrote a booklist when you can hear the lecturers who wrote the books on the list? The domino theory would imply that Universities too would become irrelevant intermediaries on the sales channel of knowledge, as expert teachers can be reached without them, just as you can buy singles direct from the bands website, or follow leading thinkers on their blogs and podcasts.

It's absolutely correct, of course, but it rests on the assumptions that Universities are selling knowledge to end consumers, just like newspapers and record companies. This is untrue. Universities are selling knowledge for resale to employers, and this introduces a generational lag into the scenario.

Most people earn a degree with the hope it will help them get a job. If good jobs were available without the time effort and expense of University, most wouldn't go. The degree sits, bright and hopeful, on the leading page of the new graduates oh-so short resumes, hoping to catch the eye of a potential employer, typically a generation older. The degree is not bought for itself, it is bought to appeal to that person. It's just like the interview suit. It may be a nice suit, it may be well cut, but it's chosen to appeal to someone a generation older. The degree, just like the suit, is bought for resale to an interviewer.

This means the domino effect will come to universities a generation later than commentators think, when that interview panel has caught up. Imagine, if you will, if a new graduate was employed based on their record collection. The graduate would choose carefully to appeal to a person born in the 1960's. There would be a little glam rock, some Some classical, but not too much. Perhaps some carefully chosen collectible vinyl. Absolutely no hip hop.

And so it is with education. It will only be in 2040, when the Twitter generation is sitting on the interview panel, that a person truly 21st century tertiary education will be taken seriously. You learned a degrees worth of knowledge from Youtube? Your learning journey documented on a Connectivist ePortfolio? Great. You'll never make the interview shortlist until the recruiters know what those things are. Until then, they'll want to see a degree from the University of The Twentieth Century, just like they have. Until that changes, the University as we know it is safe.

In defence of degrees

There is a lot to be said for tertiary degrees. In my last two posts, I touched on a key criticism of the modern University system, that it churns out people with degrees, largely so they can compete with each other on the job market, and that those degrees are largely only indicators of preexisting aptitude, determination and resource rather than being transformational in themselves. If you want to hire an exceptionally clever determined person, shortlist everyone from MIT or CalTech, as only clever and determined people can get in there.

To what extent do University degrees really transform the minds of people who earn them. Do universities really change minds? Intuitively, of course they must. It would be impossible to occupy the mind of a person for four years of a degree without somehow changing their cognitive structures. To design a programme that wouldn't change a students way of thinking at all would be difficult in the extreme.

Looking at the data point in the mirror, what did my degrees do for me? I certainly wouldn't give either of them back.

My undergraduate degree (Geology) certainly changed the way I thought. Geology is the last refuge of the generalist in science. You have to be able to get by in physics, chemistry, biology, engineering, ecology, oceanography, climatology, cosmology, astronomy, palaeontology and others and assemble fragmentary evidence from all these disciplines to solve the riddle of what a particular hunk of rock is up to. It is the ultimate integrative science, and four years of it changed the way I thought.

My PhD, less so. It was certainly an education in how not to do a large project, but it didn't change my way of thinking like my primary degree did. Mainly, it looked good on my resume, and got me shortlisted for jobs: "He has a PhD, ergo, he is a serious guy." My primary degree wasn't enough for that - everyone has a BSc these days.

What does that tell us about Universities future as producers of Graduates? It sounds rosy. They win both ways, as their graduates both have their minds transformed, and get meaty sounding qualifications. Their future is surely bright, their niche secure.

But what about the counterfactuals?

Did my undergraduate degree really change the way I thought, or did it simply repair the damage done by an old factory style secondary education system? Could better secondary education, or a richer set of respected alternative options undermine the value of a degree. Did I discover, or rediscover, how to think? And when everyone has PhDs, what use will mine be?

So long as a University education is seen as the only way to round out the intellect and earn secure employment, the University faces no existential threat. But if anything breaks that monopoly, something interesting will happen.

The Qualifications Arms Race

Frederick Roberts and Tommy Franks would have had a lot to talk about. Both led punitive expeditions to Afghanistan, 122 years apart. Both were experienced officers, artillerymen by training, seasoned by previous Imperial wars. Both were sent by confident empires keen to see justice done and try to bring Western civilisation to a country geographically isolated from it. They both led relatively small forces at the leading edge of the technologies of their day, assured that the new tools of war would soon bring the Afghans into line. They fought the same peoples, struggled with a same tactical and logistal problems imposed by the terrrain, and met with similar degrees of success. Cities were taken, battles won, kings replaced, and victory declared, without much change in the day to day existence of the 'conquered'.

There were differences, to be sure. US Casualties in 2001 and since, the subject of such media attention, would hardly have even been counted as a war in Victorian England. Videoconferences with the President would surely have been a greater irritation to a commander in the field than cables from Whitehall. The technology was more complex, certainly, but Tommy Franks could no more fly a helicopter than Frederick Roberts could drive a steam engine. They had people for those jobs.

How did these people come to lead these armies? What, as a job interviewer might ask, were their qualifications? Both fought in the imperial campaigns of their time, the Indian Rebellion, Abyssinia, Vietnam and Desert Storm, as did their peers and competitors for high command. Both men, and their competitors, had similar opportunities to distinguish themselves in the field, and earn decorations. Both, no doubt, were man of great ability and determination. They had very different backgrounds and educations.

General Tommy Franks was adopted into an ordinary family in Texas. After high school, attended the University of Texas at Austin for two years but dropped out and enlisted in the army in 1965, at age twenty. From there, basic training, training as a cryptologic analyst, and then to Artillery and Missile Officer Candidate School and commission as a 2nd Lieutenant in 1967. In later years, he completed a Bacholers Degree in Business Administration and a Masters Degree in Public Administration. He also attended the Armed Forces Staff College, the Army War College, and an Artillery Advance Course.

Frederick Roberts was the son of a General, born in Cawnpore, India. He attended Eton, Sandhurst and Addiscombe Military Academy, then a training school for officers in the Army of the British East India company. He was commissioned as a 2nd Lieutenant in that army in 1851, at age 19. three years younger than Tommy Franks. While the curriculum at Eton, Sandhurst and Addiscombe was no doubt excellent by the standard of the day, Frederick Roberts was finished his formal education and started as a 2nd Lieutenant before Tommy Franks had even enlisted. Assuming Frank's two years of military training from 1965 to 1967 as more or less equivalant to Sandhurst and Addiscombe, Franks had three more years of pre military education than Roberts, plus specialist couses, a Bacholors and Masters degree at the other end. All that amounted to perhaps ten more years of advanced education, not an unusual amount for a US Army General of the 21st century.

Why? Why did Tommy Franks need a decade more education that Frederick Roberts to do the same job, with equal success, 122 years apart? Granted, the equipment that Tommy Franks had to master at the start of his career as a forward observer in Vietnam was more complex than a horse and sabre, but he recieved specific technical training for that in addition to the what was counted above. Tommy Franks' education no doubt also covered topics as irrelevant to the task of subduing Afghanistan as Robert's Latin and Greek.

And what does this have to do with the future of Universities.

Robert had one thing Frank didn't. He was born in the right class, to an Imperial Family, son of a General. In the Victorian empire, that was mainly how leaders were selected. Some did fight their way up through the ranks, but it was the exception, not the rule. To get the job, Roberts still had to distinguish himself, but against relatively small pool. Franks was born in a different age. Anyone could enlist, and who your father was wasn't going to help much after you did. The US Army has it's generals who are scions of military families or sons of the wealthy, but they are the exception, not the rule. Without birth and breeding to set himself ahead, and with opportunities for combat and decorations as much of a random lottery in the 20th century as the 19th, what was 2nd Lieutenant Franks to do, that 2nd Lieutant Roberts didn't have to?

To keep up with his peers stay in the running for advancement, Franks needed formal qualifications, and lots of them. More of them than the other guy, if possible. Not to do the job, but to get the job. His degrees didn't help him with the Afghans, Roberts managed just fine without any. His Degrees meant he could be considered for posts that the other 2nd Lieutenants in the class of 1967 would not. In the century that divided them, and arms race of ever increasing qualification had built up. In Roberts day, a public school education was deemed an adequite academic qualification for just about anything. Viceroys of India, arguably the most powerful non hereditary job of the age, often had little more than that. Even by the 1960s, a college degree was a requirement. By the 1990's, you needed a Masters to say hello. By mid 21st century, expect a PhD and an MBA to get you to the starting gate. The people selling these degrees would have us believe that we need the technical skills in our modern world, but we know that isn't entirely true. Nothing Tommy Franks learned in college prepared him for war in Afghanistan any better than Frederick Roberts, but he needed them to get the jobs along the way. A Degree demonstrates a level of intellectual ability and persistance, but when everyone else on the shortlist has those attributes, then you need more degrees, and so on. If you're smarter than the others, great, but you still need the degrees to get on the shortlist. Much of our tertiary education efforts supports nothing more than intellectual arms race, building higher and hotter hoops of flames for people to jump through to prove their worth.

History and evolution tell us that arms races like this are unsustainable. Eventually, ever spiralling costs lead to diminishing returns. When everyone has a PhD, an MBA, twenty five years of formal education incurred at the costs of hundred of thousands of euros, will employers give up on qualifications as an indicator of ability and shift to something else. Class was abandoned as a means of selection as the 20th century showed the Aristocrats to be no more (or, arguably, less) competant than a suitable qualified person of the 'wrong' class. Could the 21st century in turn abandon qualifications? Could they be replaced with some other easy indicator of ability? It seems unthinkable, but no more unthinkable to us, then it was for a Victorian of 1879 to imagine that, one day, an army of Empire could be led by an middle class boy from Texas.

What do Universities do?

"And what do you do, now?"

It's a very Irish question. With the answer, the inquisitor, usually a woman of a certain age or an officer of the law, will place you precisely in their mental hierarchy. Your value to society will be assessed, weighed and, being Ireland, usually found wanting.

Universities should be asked the same question. What, exactly, do they do? Students, parents and government all spend a great deal on these things. Why? What, exactly, do we get for our money?

"I came to get a degree so I can get a job, make friends, have a bit of fun"

Ask any student, any they will effortlessly map and disaggregate the value of the University experience into three elements: the degree, social networks, and life experience, mostly in that order. We can probably set the fun aside - if Universities didn't exist, fun would be had elsewhere, but the degree and the social networks are hard to replicate.

Parents (and the majority of tertiary students are young and so some extent parent supported) will agree. A degree to get a job is vital, but social networks are important too. Most graduates marry people they met in college, and in later professional life, the networks you built in college can be vital. That's why people go to so their children can get into into Ivy leagues, Oxbridges or similar prestige institutions where a big part of the draw is entry into a higher status peer group.

Governments in most countries all spend a considerable chunk of taxpayers money on Tertiary Education. In public, they will make the usual arguments about high skills workforces being vital to national competitiveness, knowledge economies and so forth. That's all true, but it's not why they spend the money. Politicians spend money on Universities because it buys middle class votes. Middle aged people with kids in University vote, and they vote with their wallets. If a politician promises they can get their children through University at less cost, they will win those votes. Even outside the democracies, governments in developed countries need the support of their middle classes to survive, and the social and economic mobility that Universities provide is a good way to buy that support.

That, in a somewhat cynical nutshell, is why we pay for these creatures. That's not to say that Universities don't deliver other benefits to society (more on those another time) but those are the key outputs without which Universities would not exist on the scale that they do.

So long as society values these outputs, the future of the University is secure. But if those outputs can be delivered another way, better or cheaper, then their fate is sealed. So are Universities the best tools for training people to a high level, and building lifelong social networks? If they didn't exist, would you invent them?