Comment by ken47
9 years ago
As someone who went to an "elite" institution, I wonder why all education can't be elite. In the past, there were physical limitations -- only so many students could fit in a lecture hall, on a campus etc. So the optimal arrangement at the time was to try to match the highest-potential students with the most qualified educators -- a system that could be gamed, requires imperfect approximations, but the best that was available at the time.
Now, with today's technology, the best educators in the world can become accessible, on a read-only basis, to anyone. This is what we're starting to see, with the biggest brand-name universities exploring how to monetize such a system via MOOC's. When MOOC's mature, a lot of today's university admissions rituals will no longer make sense.
Take SATs for example -- a high school-agnostic measure of a student's capabilities. If instead, there were a standardized set of MOOC's, whose grading systems were trustworthy, then instead of approximating a student's ability to learn new material via a general standardized test, the course material itself is standardized, so SATs become redundant.
I can't wait to see where MOOC's go in the coming years, and "elite" education earn its name through means other than its exclusivity.
Elite isn't about the quality of the instruction. Elite is about who is instructed. By definition, you can't have a broad-based, democratic elite.
> Elite isn't about the quality of the instruction.
If you read the article, I think the author would disagree, as he refers to Yale and Columbia, not himself, as an elite education.
Here's a thought experiment. If Harvard's professors were swapped out for high school teachers, "elite" students would be less inclined to attend, and over several years, the quality of students at Harvard would almost certainly drop.
Conversely, if someone created a university with all the world's most renowned lecturers, in several years, "elite" students would likely be yearning to attend.
And I'm not clear on what you mean by "democratic elite." There would still be elite students. Two things would be different:
1) Their designation could be determined by cleaner data than was possible in a pre-MOOC world. In the current world, there are few clean baselines on which to evaluate students from different high schools, for example, which is one of the main reasons standardized tests like the SAT exist.
2) If we assume that a better lecturer will help increase a student's knowledge, regardless of the student's quality, then every student's knowledge could be maximized in the post-MOOC world, not just the small fraction that are able to gain entry to elite institutions.