My child is an edupunk @ [noschool]

Education has been the topic of many spirited discussions with my friends, both with college degrees and without. I fall into the without camp. A deluge of reasons contribute to that, but for now I’ll stick to my experienced in one year of college that it seems my friends and my generation share: a general feeling of uselessness for college education.

That’s not to say there is no value to having a college degree: it opens doors, it offers a certain proof of dedication and education in a variety of subjects. It’s a prerequisite for higher levels of specialized learning. It also, though, testifies to a considerable investment, and with tuition burgeoning astronomically, my generation (on the cusp of grad school) is wondering about the value of that investment because we’ve been self-educating and succeeding without putting ourselves into frightening amounts of debt. To me, there’s wisdom in wanting to remain debt-free.

Fast Company published a vindicating article for those of us who are using free resources and the collaborative elements on the internet to not only “learn” but develop skills that transcend a targeted bunch of knowledge.

This article mirrors the dissonance I feel about the prospect of paying tens of thousands of dollars for a type of knowledge that is very specific and doesn’t seem to translate into the type of work I’m doing now. Right now, I learn as I go. I discover something I need to do to accomplish a project and then I look for resources that tell me how to get to that next step. Then, I build on top of that to make my work better (for example, a photoshop tutorial to color-correct photos, a meeting with a friend who knows how to build websites).

Essentially, the Fast company article is about the colleges of the future: cheaper, virtual, universal. This is incredibly appealing. It takes out the element of college that gets stuck in my throat – the cost, the rigidity – and works within the digital, recombinant, fast-evolving world that is more like my workplace. There’s something beautiful about it: spending a tenth of the money for a more appropriate education opens the doors for low-income families or people who are putting themselves through school, as well as those of us in a love-hate relationship with institutions of higher learning.

The developers of these new universities, open educational resources and solutions have a hard time achieving accreditation and recognition. It’s understandable: there are no hallowed halls on the internet, and the idea of internet startups conjure flimsy dot-coms, flavors of the week, social distractions and scams. Not to mention they ARE new, and don’t have generations of clout with the powers that be.

But even more than those obstacles (that programs sourced by MIT can do a lot to diminish), universities are threatened by that level of competition. Their administrative and housing costs, and the inefficiencies of place make it unlikely they could compete, unless they made drastic changes to lower the bureaucracy and adopt radical structural changes. It poses a real threat, even if colleges are laughing it off as they ratchet up their tuition.

My personal traverse through prosaic collegiate life convinced me that there must be a better way to mainline knowledge. I graduated from a fantastic public high school that relentlessly asked for in-depth, ongoing research, analysis without prompts, complete subject comprehension and an ability to write fluently and infer answers based on two to three years’ study . I was expected to have a personal opinion and defend it with facts.

College was socially exciting but academically barren. I had okay classes, but I felt I was paying (considerably above average tuition) to take a step back in skills and subject matter. I took 4 literature courses and perhaps 80% of what we studied I’d already read and studied in high school. I took a government class and was asked to summarize more than analyze. I believe there is, as you move along, a richer experience in higher-level courses, but I was unwilling to put my education on hold while my peers learned how to write college-level papers. In my job today, I only use skills I learned in high school or on my own.

More than anything (truly) I wanted to sit in a Gothic windowsill and study. I relished the feeling of being in college but my education was anemic.

Tangentially,

Universities have throughout history been inaccessible on a class, gender or race basis, and so I wonder how much adversity would be shat upon a truly open-source education: not because it won’t work, not because it won’t be excellent, but because it represents the demise of the last bastion of class-ism: the education pedigree.

Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic brought this to my attention on an another issue with her following thoughts:

One thingto keep in mind is that race, and racism, have rarely ever acted alone. One of the best points that Phillip Dray makes in his classic history of lynching is that epidemics of lynching often coincided, not just with an expansion of black rights, but with increased labor mobility among white women. So fear of white women, and their independence, as well as fear of sexual competition, all worked in concert. It wasn’t simply “I hate niggers”–it never is. It was “I don’t much like black people, and prices are going up, and I have to let my wife work, so I can survive, and I’m scared she won’t stay with me if she’s not dependent on me and I’d die if she left me for a black guy.” Or some such.

Ditto for the Civil Rights Movement. It wasn’t just racism–it was class also. In the South you had this black middle class that always had to be deferential to the most poorest white person in the world. The prospect of losing that deference, of already being lower than the white aristocracy and now also being lower than a class of blacks too, wreaked havoc.

Is it fear of losing that middle-class entitlement talisman that has kept higher education from cascading into an open-source model? Of course, it could be plenty of other constructs, like employment, the cyclical nature of professorships, the earnings potential built in to layers and layers of administration to produce a high-value product… but I think, now that universities all over the country are struggling with meager enrollment and diminished revenues, if we don’t see a fundamental change in structure we’ll know it’s not about money so much as status.