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.

Review: DIY U by Anya Kamenetz

"DIY U: Edupunks, Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher Education", by Anya Kamenetz, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2010.

This is  good introduction to the current state of tertiary education in the United States, the Open Education movement and the potential for technology driven disruption to the sector.

The book is tightly focused on the US situation, the rest of the world gets an honourable mention.

The first half is a fairly critical overview of the state of Tertiary Education in the US.  It's interesting, but the issues are not as valid for Europe where the costs are lower, and social inequality less severe. The Gini coefficient (a measure of inequality) for the US is currently around 47, about the same as places like Kenya, and Jamaica, compared to 35 in Ireland, where I write, or 24 in egalitarian Denmark. The extent of the problems in the US system are alarming, and a good warning for those who might ape the American system.

Kamenetz takes the view that much of higher education in the US is a racket. High cost enforces scarcity of space at elite institutions, and filters out students from advantaged backgrounds. The Graduates from elite institutions, filtered by class and economics before their first day on campus, then proceed to do well and form the next generation of the elite. They even promote themselves on the basis of their selectivity:

 "It's like Weight watchers advertising that they only take skinny people."

The system excludes many on grounds of costs, and many more enter the system,  incur student debt and yet fail to graduate to reap the marginal benefits of a degree at a lesser college. She is critical of a system where everyone aspires to go to college, when not everyone needs to, and every college aspires to compete with Harvard. The cheap credit of the 00's drove massive expansion of student debt as people borrowed vast amounts of easy money for degrees they often never completed, driving spiralling fees as people equated cost with exclusivity and quality.

In the second half of the book she moves on to talk about solutions, driven by technology, and the Open Education movement. Why pay fees when you can get the knowledge for free? Why go to such expense to build social networks when we can build networks of people with a common interests faster and cheaper online? She correctly identifies assessment and accreditation as the critical points not easily solved online, and raises the question of whether in the internet age, online portfolios of work could replace conventional accreditation. She cites the idea of open source projects in Software, where a potential hire can be checked out in advance by the quality of their work in open source software projects. Ideas like 'Whuffie' and smart assessments get a mention too.

It's a good overview of the topic. All the main events, players and ideas, from The MIT Open Courseware through to Personal Learning Environments, The University of the People and Massive Open Online Courses are covered in brief. If you've been following thinkers like Stephen Downes, David Wiley and George Siemens online, there won't be much here that is new to you, but if you've only heard the terms Edupunk and Open Educational Resources, then it's an quick primer on what going on in the sector, and what changes it could bring.

It's short, clear and to the point. The author is a journalist not an academic, and it shows. Few academics write so clearly, most would drag it out to 400 pages to little extra effect.  Even if you are familiar with the ground, it's probably worth a read. If you are not, and have an interest, it's a good starting point.





I

Statistics.com: The thin end of the wedge

"The Specialists" by Steve Kolowich, Inside Higher Ed, April 5 2010.

Kolowich hits the nail on the head in this article on a number of themes, taking Statistics.com as an example of the type of entity that I think will be a central player in Education in the 21st century. The article is well worth a read.

Statistics.com seems to operate the Superstar model - I'll confess I don't know who the Superstars of Statistics are (it seems a strange idea!) but the Faculty looks grunty enough to make a land grab for the title. The course programme is comprehensive, and seems to have the relevant approvals and certifications. The Faculty is global, and grading is outsourced to India. One assumes that mentoring and synchronous tutorials are run from there too, or if not, they soon will be. Finally, and most importantly, the site operates by distance. It's in direct competition with every statistics department on earth.

Existing Universities will probably fight long and hard against this. It's Turkeys voting for Christmas. The article notes:

"Traditional institutions, however, have been hesitant to open the door to commercial ventures that sell higher education by the course or program."

Hesitant? No Kidding. Only a foolhardy or bankrupt University head would suggest downsizing the Stats department and contracting in a third party provider. It's also culturally incomprehensible and politically intractable. Most Universities think distance education is beneath contempt, unless it's their own  lecturers putting own Powerpoints on Blackboard, in which case it's a dynamic, innovative revenue stream. The idea of contracting out a core activity like teaching is politically impossible to institutions which just about manage to contract out the cleaning and catering.

The best new entrants like this can hope for is that a University might grant exemptions to students who have completed modules with them. It's tempting, would you lose out on fees for a potential MSc student because you won't recognise the modules, when the University of Down the Road will? The article suggests that is indeed the case:

"The [American Council for Education] says that it has never heard of a college refusing to accept credits earned in Statistics.com courses."

In the end though, the success of providers like this hinges on employers. If you were taking on a hire who needed stats and they had paper from Statistics.com, would you give them the time of day? If the market is tight, or the candidate is otherwise strong, you might think it worth the effort to get one of your existing Stats guys to check it out, or run some skill tests on the new hire. If there's twenty strong resumes in the pile, you might not bother and just hire the person who took their Stats from the same department you did. Even so, that's still progress. You probably have existing staff that need to be skilled up in Stats. You could send them down to the local college, but their lecture schedule is insane and won't gel at all with a working day. You could hire in a guy for some onsite training, but that's major expense and it won't wash for three people. Maybe you'll enroll them with Statistics.com, see how it works out...

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.