Google University on YouTube at Starbucks in Barnes and Nobles
A Product Proposal
Dear Google,
I am the Director of the Philosophy Program at a one of the many little colleges recently retro-fitted to become a university in Western PA. After 18 years of steadily teaching at a reputable little college, with the magic of our new university stature I suddenly found myself applying for, and receiving, tenure. My job and income are now secure. Gee, what an improvement for student-learning outcomes. So let me put my new tenure to use and see if it works.
It is clear to me that post-secondary (College and University) undergraduate education both costs too much and the general quality is far from as good as it should be in light of the extortionate price students and their parents are forced to pay. According to the Pew Foundation funded American Institutes for Research 2006 study, “The National Survey of America’s College Students,” one half of four-year college graduates will not be able to articulate what I have so far written, much less grasp the basic argument of any article written in the Chronicle of Higher Education or, for that matter, any speech critical of post-secondary education delivered by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings herself. This means the majority of American college graduates are unable to figure out exactly how they, and their families, may have been gouged by their Alma Maters.
According to the Pew-funded study :
• More than 75 percent of students at 2-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at 4-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy. This means that they lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks, such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials.
• Students in 2- and 4-year colleges have the greatest difficulty with quantitative literacy: approximately 30 percent of students in 2-year institutions and nearly 20 percent of students in 4-year institutions have only Basic quantitative literacy. Basic skills are those necessary to compare ticket prices or calculate the cost of a sandwich and a salad from a menu.
If this study is accurate, and anecdotal evidence of graduating seniors certainly suggests it is, there is no just reason for any student to pay $100,000 (more than the cost of most homes in Western PA) for a four-year degree. Most disturbing, however, is the implication when looking at the power of compound interest: If the $100,000 spent on college were invested in a mutual fund instead, it would be worth vastly more than the $1 million dollar increase in lifetime earning power a college education is alleged to be worth. If the money spent on a college education were invested in TIAA-CREF, where university employees invest their own retirement funds, by the time the student reached the age of retirement in 40 years that $100,000, at 10% per year, would be worth $4,525,925.56 -- in 50 years $11,739,085.29. Instead, what now happens is parents simply lose a hefty portion of their own retirement while footing the bill for their kids’ vastly over-priced college degrees. In a word, despite college propaganda to the contrary, at current rates, a four year degree at a typical college or university dramatically decreases a family’s overall lifetime wealth rather than increasing it.
Consequently, it makes sense that for-profit institutions like Google, Amazon, Barnes and Nobles or even Starbucks, begin to consider applying for university accreditation, and offering degrees of their own. Clearly, well-run for-profits like yours are vastly more economically efficient than any non-profit college or university. And your efficiency is a consequence of following the basic economic principle that an informed consumer will always purchase the best value for the least money. I, like most parents, would happily send my children to Google University if I knew they would learn more there than at a higher priced university. And unlike non-profits where there is little incentive to quantify results for comparison shopping, profit-making institutions thrive on promoting their quantifiable successes. The best are quick to demonstrate why they are the best and thereby sell more.
So, Google is ideally positioned to dominate the post-secondary education market, and do it without hiring a single tenured professor. Though once tenure protected the academic freedom of innovative faculty, tenure now only ensures the homogeneity of thought of those tenured. Tenure has itself now become an impediment to the novel ideas it was originally designed to protect. Google could escape the tenure trap by not hiring any faculty at all. Instead of hiring the faculty themselves, institutions like Google could simply purchase a vast library of taped, high quality, lectures given by academic super stars or other top performing teachers who are willing to sell series of their lectures (perhaps even receiving residuals if they really rock!). These professors would operate as free agents in a digital world of Professors Without Boarders. As Jeffrey Toobin reports in New Yorker Magazine, Google has already started the process of digitizing all books published, and certainly that would include all filmed academic lectures.
As a consequence, I would like to develop a trial philosophy class that will be offered on YouTube -- perhaps start with Philosophy and Theater or Introduction to Philosophy. My long term goal, however, is to develop, for lack of a better term, a Google University on YouTube Philosophy Major. My students at the brick and mortar university campus where I teach would be required to watch the lectures on YouTube and then submit papers in class. But all the class material would be available to the entire YouTube audience, and any institution that might want to use this class as part of their own curriculum would be free to. Yes, a free college class on YouTube, that’s my initial plan.
If successful, perhaps other free-agent professors will follow, and once a sufficient number of competently taught, enjoyable, entertaining, college courses are provided for free, this could begin to break the de facto price fixing of the American post-secondary education cartel in league with their accrediting institutions. With the aid of Margaret Spellings, this college cartel has finally become vulnerable to the demands of the market place. Parents may soon finally compare educational products based on quantifiable outcomes, and buy a degree based on highest quality for lowest price. Google can easily deliver what the non-profits have so far refused to: the best education at the best price. Institutions, without the requisite faculty, like Google, Amazon or any various libraries and book stores, certainly could easily provide competently taught, college credit quality, courses on platforms like YouTube.
Google’s purchase of YouTube, combined with the demands of out-priced parents and the pressure of the US Department of Education that post-secondary education finally provide quantifiable results -- all coming together within in the last six months -- shouts loud that the time for Professors Without Borders has arrived. I know for a fact that there are many many highly educated, highly competent, PhD, University and College faculty willing to work as free-agent professors for advanced education. I also know by hiring free-agent professors, Google would be capable of offering vastly more enjoyable, higher quality and less expensive college degrees than are currently available at other colleges and universities existing on line or in brick and mortar. With large enough numbers of students and high enough quality of professors’ lectures and the stellar name of Google to kick this off, the era of the ten dollar, accredited, 3-credit, college class is here. This after all is the real payoff of the computer age. Over a few tens of years those rare monster computers have now been reduced to a wallet-sized commonplace, the same should be so for the four-year degree, and Google can do it, Google should do it: a Harvard-quality undergraduate education on an ipod, while sipping espresso.
It is entirely conceivable that libraries, book stores and coffee houses could offer degrees of their own using the lectures purchased and digitized by Google. Grading could easily be out-sourced inexpensively, done by professional graders in Bangalore or Beijing. After all, as Thomas Friedman made clear, the world really is flatter than we like to imagine. (Where do you think H&R Block sends overflow tax forms, Kansas? Not really.) Outsourcing grading to third party graders in Asia, would have the additional benefit of helping to eliminate grade inflation, since graders would have no professional incentive to please students with padded grades in order to keep their jobs.
"Google University on YouTube at Starbucks in Barnes and Nobles," would not only reduce the cost of education to students, the competition between professors to produce the best lectures would create vastly superior lectures, and the competition between for-profit institutions in order to attract students would produce vastly better outcomes for students, and therefore would even help American corporations, like Google itself, who need highly competent employees.
Please call me or write me or email me if you would like to discuss this further, or if you think I might be of help. If I keep writing things like this, the tenure thing may not really be as bullet proof as I am hoping; so I may soon REALLY need that job.
Sincerely Yours,
Associate Professor Carmine
(Free Agent Philosophy Professor; Professor Without Borders)
Associate Professor of Philosophy
Dear Google,
I am the Director of the Philosophy Program at a one of the many little colleges recently retro-fitted to become a university in Western PA. After 18 years of steadily teaching at a reputable little college, with the magic of our new university stature I suddenly found myself applying for, and receiving, tenure. My job and income are now secure. Gee, what an improvement for student-learning outcomes. So let me put my new tenure to use and see if it works.
It is clear to me that post-secondary (College and University) undergraduate education both costs too much and the general quality is far from as good as it should be in light of the extortionate price students and their parents are forced to pay. According to the Pew Foundation funded American Institutes for Research 2006 study, “The National Survey of America’s College Students,” one half of four-year college graduates will not be able to articulate what I have so far written, much less grasp the basic argument of any article written in the Chronicle of Higher Education or, for that matter, any speech critical of post-secondary education delivered by U.S. Secretary of Education Margaret Spellings herself. This means the majority of American college graduates are unable to figure out exactly how they, and their families, may have been gouged by their Alma Maters.
According to the Pew-funded study :
• More than 75 percent of students at 2-year colleges and more than 50 percent of students at 4-year colleges do not score at the proficient level of literacy. This means that they lack the skills to perform complex literacy tasks, such as comparing credit card offers with different interest rates or summarizing the arguments of newspaper editorials.
• Students in 2- and 4-year colleges have the greatest difficulty with quantitative literacy: approximately 30 percent of students in 2-year institutions and nearly 20 percent of students in 4-year institutions have only Basic quantitative literacy. Basic skills are those necessary to compare ticket prices or calculate the cost of a sandwich and a salad from a menu.
If this study is accurate, and anecdotal evidence of graduating seniors certainly suggests it is, there is no just reason for any student to pay $100,000 (more than the cost of most homes in Western PA) for a four-year degree. Most disturbing, however, is the implication when looking at the power of compound interest: If the $100,000 spent on college were invested in a mutual fund instead, it would be worth vastly more than the $1 million dollar increase in lifetime earning power a college education is alleged to be worth. If the money spent on a college education were invested in TIAA-CREF, where university employees invest their own retirement funds, by the time the student reached the age of retirement in 40 years that $100,000, at 10% per year, would be worth $4,525,925.56 -- in 50 years $11,739,085.29. Instead, what now happens is parents simply lose a hefty portion of their own retirement while footing the bill for their kids’ vastly over-priced college degrees. In a word, despite college propaganda to the contrary, at current rates, a four year degree at a typical college or university dramatically decreases a family’s overall lifetime wealth rather than increasing it.
Consequently, it makes sense that for-profit institutions like Google, Amazon, Barnes and Nobles or even Starbucks, begin to consider applying for university accreditation, and offering degrees of their own. Clearly, well-run for-profits like yours are vastly more economically efficient than any non-profit college or university. And your efficiency is a consequence of following the basic economic principle that an informed consumer will always purchase the best value for the least money. I, like most parents, would happily send my children to Google University if I knew they would learn more there than at a higher priced university. And unlike non-profits where there is little incentive to quantify results for comparison shopping, profit-making institutions thrive on promoting their quantifiable successes. The best are quick to demonstrate why they are the best and thereby sell more.
So, Google is ideally positioned to dominate the post-secondary education market, and do it without hiring a single tenured professor. Though once tenure protected the academic freedom of innovative faculty, tenure now only ensures the homogeneity of thought of those tenured. Tenure has itself now become an impediment to the novel ideas it was originally designed to protect. Google could escape the tenure trap by not hiring any faculty at all. Instead of hiring the faculty themselves, institutions like Google could simply purchase a vast library of taped, high quality, lectures given by academic super stars or other top performing teachers who are willing to sell series of their lectures (perhaps even receiving residuals if they really rock!). These professors would operate as free agents in a digital world of Professors Without Boarders. As Jeffrey Toobin reports in New Yorker Magazine, Google has already started the process of digitizing all books published, and certainly that would include all filmed academic lectures.
As a consequence, I would like to develop a trial philosophy class that will be offered on YouTube -- perhaps start with Philosophy and Theater or Introduction to Philosophy. My long term goal, however, is to develop, for lack of a better term, a Google University on YouTube Philosophy Major. My students at the brick and mortar university campus where I teach would be required to watch the lectures on YouTube and then submit papers in class. But all the class material would be available to the entire YouTube audience, and any institution that might want to use this class as part of their own curriculum would be free to. Yes, a free college class on YouTube, that’s my initial plan.
If successful, perhaps other free-agent professors will follow, and once a sufficient number of competently taught, enjoyable, entertaining, college courses are provided for free, this could begin to break the de facto price fixing of the American post-secondary education cartel in league with their accrediting institutions. With the aid of Margaret Spellings, this college cartel has finally become vulnerable to the demands of the market place. Parents may soon finally compare educational products based on quantifiable outcomes, and buy a degree based on highest quality for lowest price. Google can easily deliver what the non-profits have so far refused to: the best education at the best price. Institutions, without the requisite faculty, like Google, Amazon or any various libraries and book stores, certainly could easily provide competently taught, college credit quality, courses on platforms like YouTube.
Google’s purchase of YouTube, combined with the demands of out-priced parents and the pressure of the US Department of Education that post-secondary education finally provide quantifiable results -- all coming together within in the last six months -- shouts loud that the time for Professors Without Borders has arrived. I know for a fact that there are many many highly educated, highly competent, PhD, University and College faculty willing to work as free-agent professors for advanced education. I also know by hiring free-agent professors, Google would be capable of offering vastly more enjoyable, higher quality and less expensive college degrees than are currently available at other colleges and universities existing on line or in brick and mortar. With large enough numbers of students and high enough quality of professors’ lectures and the stellar name of Google to kick this off, the era of the ten dollar, accredited, 3-credit, college class is here. This after all is the real payoff of the computer age. Over a few tens of years those rare monster computers have now been reduced to a wallet-sized commonplace, the same should be so for the four-year degree, and Google can do it, Google should do it: a Harvard-quality undergraduate education on an ipod, while sipping espresso.
It is entirely conceivable that libraries, book stores and coffee houses could offer degrees of their own using the lectures purchased and digitized by Google. Grading could easily be out-sourced inexpensively, done by professional graders in Bangalore or Beijing. After all, as Thomas Friedman made clear, the world really is flatter than we like to imagine. (Where do you think H&R Block sends overflow tax forms, Kansas? Not really.) Outsourcing grading to third party graders in Asia, would have the additional benefit of helping to eliminate grade inflation, since graders would have no professional incentive to please students with padded grades in order to keep their jobs.
"Google University on YouTube at Starbucks in Barnes and Nobles," would not only reduce the cost of education to students, the competition between professors to produce the best lectures would create vastly superior lectures, and the competition between for-profit institutions in order to attract students would produce vastly better outcomes for students, and therefore would even help American corporations, like Google itself, who need highly competent employees.
Please call me or write me or email me if you would like to discuss this further, or if you think I might be of help. If I keep writing things like this, the tenure thing may not really be as bullet proof as I am hoping; so I may soon REALLY need that job.
Sincerely Yours,
Associate Professor Carmine
(Free Agent Philosophy Professor; Professor Without Borders)
Associate Professor of Philosophy
posted by James D. Carmine PhD at 3/05/2007 12:15:00 PM
6 Comments:
Interesting blog.
Read your post from some other location, so I thought I would comment here to bring attention to the source.
I have had similar thoughts before - but what it comes down to is establishing reputation. What Harvard, Yale or Princeton deliver is not education but entry to an exclusive club and nothing more. Their graduates populate the upper levels of the establishment and eventually we will see a caste system of sorts develop.
The physics or math Harvard teaches for a $40K per year tuition is no different from what, say, the University of Florida teaches for $3000 per year.
Hear, hear!
The YouTube synergy was not there when I made these observations google.edu and Picks and Shovels, but I would agree that with YouTube they are even more uniquely positioned to do this.
It appears that there would be tons of cash to whoever did this best and Google has the chance to it best.
So, obviously this is moving through the Zeitgeist. I suspect that the problem is that Google, being a lottery winner, is besieged with plenty of advice on where next to invest their money. And from what I understand there is no lack of smart people at Google, so I can only assume that there are BBDs (Bigger, Better Deals) between maintaining their lead in search and opening Google University.
The real question is: What intermittent monetization strategies exist between you uploading lectures to YouTube and Google formalizing Google U. as a service from Google Labs? I guarantee that the best way to get them to put money behind it is for your to be drawing money from it--with them footing the initial bill for infrastructure and webservice. If you could make some cash from it, then that might attract more professors to the idea faster, too.
Dr. Carmine,
Brilliant analysis though you forgot to include Walmart into the solution. Maybe they could take over the Community College market.
Could part of the slide of student performance be the increasing requirement for and accessibility to college?
Even in the 70s and 80s, one didn't need a college degree to find reasonable employment. Now, Masters candidates are making your lattes.
Unless you can clean hotel rooms, or trim hedges, your options are limited to an extent not seen in this country prior to today.
And I won't get into the unholy alliance among private industry, university research, and student loan corporations.
Can't you go the Michael Sandel route via his lectures at Harvard?
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