By Pamela Hieronymi (The Chronicle)
This spring, Harvard University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a $60-million venture to offer free classes online. Just last month the University of California at Berkeley said it would also join the effort. John Hennessy, president of Stanford, recently predicted that a technology "tsunami" is about to hit higher education. When justifying their decision to remove Teresa Sullivan as president of the University of Virginia, the Board of Visitors cited, in part, the need to ride this wave.
As we think about the future of education, we need to sharpen our understanding of what education is and what educators do. Education is often compared to two other industries upended by the Internet: journalism and publishing. This is a serious error.
Education is not the transmission of information or ideas. Education is the training needed to make use of information and ideas. As information breaks loose from bookstores and libraries and floods onto computers and mobile devices, that training becomes more important, not less.
Educators are coaches, personal trainers in intellectual fitness. The value we add to the media extravaganza is like the value the trainer adds to the gym or the coach adds to the equipment. We provide individualized instruction in how to evaluate and make use of information and ideas, teaching people how to think for themselves.
Just as coaching requires individual attention, education, at its core, requires one mind engaging with another, in real time: listening, understanding, correcting, modeling, suggesting, prodding, denying, affirming, and critiquing thoughts and their expression.
A set of podcasts is the 21st-century equivalent of a textbook, not the 21st-century equivalent of a teacher. Every age has its autodidacts, gifted people able to teach themselves with only their books. Woe unto us if we require all citizens to manifest that ability.
Of course, computers do much more than deliver podcasts. They enable new forms of communicating. They present information in incredibly understandable and previously unimaginable ways. They even interact with students, correcting assignments for which there are clearly delineated standards of error and success. They can greatly expand the power of the multiple-choice quiz; they can learn which drills remedy which errors. Computers are getting ever better at correcting grammar and expressions in natural language.
These capacities should be celebrated. But they should not be confused with the training provided by one mind interacting with another—when, for example, a teacher discerns what is on a student's mind (even though the thought may be novel and half-formed); sees how it relates to the material; and knows how to question, encourage, challenge, or otherwise prompt the student to find his or her own way out of confusion, to a clearer expression of thought or a more powerful argument or analysis.
In their online venture, Harvard and MIT may evaluate essays in the humanities with natural-language programs and crowdsourcing: peer-graded essays for everyone, all the time. It is as though elite educators, upon noticing that we can't program a computer to discern what is on the mind of an undergraduate, decided to pretend that if we just let those seeking an education talk among themselves (in grammatically felicitous sentences), they will somehow come to express difficult ideas in persuasive arguments and arrive at coherent, important insights about society, politics, and culture.
As someone who spends time with students in directed conversations on difficult subjects, I'm sure the online model won't work. We will, instead, produce graduates who cast assumptions they've never really questioned into grammatically correct slogans, and the sloganeers with the catchiest phrases, the most confidence, and the most money will shape the future.
Education matters because ideas matter. Oppressive regimes around the world recognize this and restrict the flow of ideas. Our approach has been, instead, to train ourselves to traffic in ideas, civilly and judiciously.
Technology can make education better. It will do so, in part, by forcing us to reflect on what education is, identify what only a person can do, and devote educators' time to that. (When we build machines that do all that a person can do, we will have created either fellow citizens or enemies; we'll then have other problems.)
Can technology make education less expensive? College is expensive, but colleges do things other than educate. Many courses simply convey information and provide technical vocational skills. These could be automated, presumably at savings. The price tag includes the campus experience—an education of a different sort—with all its lovely, cherished amenities.
But the core task of training minds is labor-intensive; it requires the time and effort of smart, highly trained individuals. We will not make it significantly less time-consuming without sacrificing quality. And so, I am afraid, we will not make that core task significantly less expensive without cheapening it.
Pamela Hieronymi is a professor of philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles and, this year, a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University.
By MELISSA KORN
More than one of every five undergrads is a
business major, but the discipline might not deserve such a large
following. Melissa Korn has details on The News Hub.
More than 20% of U.S. undergraduates are business majors, nearly double the next most common major, social sciences and history.
The proportion has held relatively steady for the past 30 years, but now faculty members, school administrators and corporate recruiters are questioning the value of a business degree at the undergraduate level.
The biggest complaint: The undergraduate degrees focus too much on the nuts and bolts of finance and accounting and don't develop enough critical thinking and problem-solving skills through long essays, in-class debates and other hallmarks of liberal-arts courses.
Companies say they need flexible thinkers with innovative ideas and a broad knowledge base derived from exposure to multiple disciplines. And while most recruiters don't outright avoid business majors, companies in consulting, technology and even finance say they're looking for candidates with a broader academic background.
Schools are taking the hint. The business schools at George Washington University, Georgetown University, Santa Clara University and others are tweaking their undergraduate business curricula in an attempt to better integrate lessons on history, ethics and writing into courses about finance and marketing.
Along with more than 20 other U.S. and European business schools, those institutions met last month at George Washington for a conference to discuss ways to better integrate a liberal-arts education into the business curriculum. It was organized by the Aspen Institute, a nonprofit group with an arm that studies management education and society. Other participants included Franklin & Marshall College, Babson College and Esade, a business and law school at Barcelona's Ramon Llull University.
Doug Guthrie, dean of the George Washington University School of Business, is planning to draw on expertise in the university's psychology and philosophy departments to teach business ethics and he'll seek help from the engineering program to address sustainability. He expects to introduce the new curriculum, which will also include a core course on business and society, in the fall.
Such changes should appease recruiters, who have been seeking well-rounded candidates from other disciplines, such as English, economics and engineering. Even financial companies say those students often have sharp critical-thinking skills and problem-solving techniques that business majors sometimes lack.
"Firms are looking for talent. They're not looking for content knowledge, per se," says Scott Rostan, founder of Training the Street Inc., which provides financial training courses for new hires at a number of investment banks. "They're not hiring someone just because they took an M&A class."
Business degrees have been offered since at least the 1800s, but they were often considered vocational programs. Some experts argue that the programs belong at trade schools and that students should use their undergraduate years to learn something about the world before heading to business school for an M.B.A.
Next fall, the University of Denver's Daniels College of Business will provide a required course to teach first-year students how to view business issues in a global context. The class, being piloted this spring, will have instruction in business history, ethics, social responsibility, sustainability and other subjects.
Introducing such concepts early in students' academic careers should help them "connect the dots," says Daniel Connolly, associate dean for undergraduate programs at the business school.
Even some European schools, which have encouraged a narrow focus in college studies historically, are looking to expand.
"Education is more than technical learning," says Alfred Vernis, director of university programs at Esade. He says the humanities need to be "embedded" in the rest of the program. Esade expects to unveil a new undergraduate business curriculum for the fall of 2013.
Are schools going far enough? It's too early to tell, many recruiters say. But in any case companies will probably continue to look at nonbusiness students to ensure a diverse pool.
Facebook Inc., a hot destination for many college graduates, doesn't recruit based on a particular major. "It's not about what you have or haven't studied," says Kristen Clemmer Meeks, a recruiting manager at the social-media company. She says some jobs require more analytical know-how, though new hires for those teams can come from business, economics, math or other programs.
Margaret Copete is director of North America campus recruiting at consultancy Booz & Co., which increased undergraduate hiring 59% this academic year. She says that about a third of the newest class studied business in school, and the rest majored in subjects including math, nursing and economics. At the undergraduate level, Ms. Copete says, she's looking for students with "the basic building blocks" who can be trained "to be great consultants."
Mr. Somers will begin a job in fixed-income index product sales at Barclays Capital in July. He believes that studying business helped him secure the position because it showed he's "passionate" about the field.
Tara Udut, the head of campus recruitment for the Americas at Barclays, says that about half the bank's new analyst hires in recent years have come from business, finance, economics or accounting but that "students from nonfinance backgrounds bring a valuable perspective." Still, she says, applicants from the liberal arts often need to "undertake extra due diligence on the industry."
Write to Melissa Korn at melissa.korn@wsj.com
A version of this article appeared April 5,
2012, on page B1 in some U.S. editions of The Wall Street Journal, with
the headline: Wealth or Waste? Rethinking The Value of a
Business Major.
The
IYF authors focus on the so-called "NEETs" in the United States and
Europe. NEET stands for those Not Engaged in Employment/education, or
Training. A 2012 U.S. study put the social cost per NEET youth at
$37,450, when you factored in lost earnings, public health spending, and
other factors. That brings the total cost of 6.7 million NEET American
youths to $4.75 trillion, equal to nearly a third of GDP, or half of
U.S. public debt.
