The Four Year College Degree — Does It Make Sense Anymore?
By: James Riddle
Tags: Education Technology, Mooc, Edtech, Education

NYU professor of marketing and entrepreneur Scott Galloway was recently quoted in a Business Insider article as saying “Education, other than maybe healthcare, is more ripe for disruption than any other $100 billion-plus industry in the US”.

And it’s true…

The cost of education and healthcare have both increased dramatically over the years, while the quality of their product hasn’t really improved.

The Coronavirus pandemic has upended our conception of how a classroom has to work. Online universities used to be considered the lazy uncle of traditional academia, but now every school from the University of Phoenix to Harvard and MIT are teaching their classes in the same format. Although quality of professors and rigor of classes may vary, it seems harder and harder to justify the difference of cost between your local college and an elite university when the format is becoming more equitable. Not only that, does the traditional college degree model even make sense?

This isn’t a new concept, but it’s very important right now.

While the pandemic has raised our awareness of new classroom options, innovations in education have been around for awhile. Now just may be the time that these innovations are more widely used and accepted as the norm. Online education isn’t restricted to public or private universities. Quite the contrary, open education platforms like Coursera, Udemy and Edx (among many others) have been around for years offering free or low cost education on specialized topics. Google has begun their own online certification programs, and have put their money where their mouth is by promising to put graduates into Google apprenticeships. MIT and Harvard have many options available through online platforms, and MIT offers MicroMasters programs, where you take graduate level classes online and get a certification at the end.

This enables students across geography and income level access to a world class education.

Programs like these are cost effective and scalable. The MIT example entails proctored exams so there’s at least some level of human feedback during the learning process. Although I don’t know the insider details of how MIT scales and delegates final grading, it’s completely conceivable that a few top-level professors create and record the actual content, tens of thousands of students participate in the program, and then the final grading can be delegated to numerous assistants and contractors who are completely qualified to do so. This enables students across geography and class access to a world class education.

Online courses such as these also offer self-pacing. This could mean taking additional time to learn something if life disrupts your learning process. This also means speeding up your own learning. Scott Young, the author of the book Ultralearning, has an entire strategy for learning quickly and deeply. His “Ultralearning” projects include completing an MIT computer science curriculum in 1 year vs 4, and learning 4 languages within 1 year. Although you can debate whether his strategy is realistic or even viable for deep learning, the evidence points towards the traditional educational path not being the most effective for everyone.

These options also enable students the ability to built a wider range of knowledge and explore topics they may not have known they were interested in. I didn’t know what career I wanted when I was deciding on a college major (frankly, I still don’t know what I want to be when I grow up), and forcing 18 year high school graduates to make such a large decision is not only daunting, but it’s an unethical pressure that our society currently enforces.

Personally, I’m beginning a pathway of further education utilizing these resources myself (more blogs to come about that). I earned a degree in Public Relations at a traditional university and ended up in a digital marketing analytics career. While my degree absolutely helped prepare me for my professional career, there are major skills that I can develop with online courses that will directly benefit my career advancement, without having to sacrifice the time and resources to go back to college. This seems to be the story for many in my field. While marketing analytics is a growing field, very few universities directly prepare students to become digital analysts for ad agencies or marketing departments. That’s one example where these types of online education options come in handy.

Whether you’re interested in learning deeply about a hobby topic, or furthering your career options, online learning seems to be here to stay. The four year college degree, while it may be absolutely necessary for some career paths, needs to be debated an optimized. What has to come for the future economy is acceptance and normalization of a new educational pathway, and I hope that’s one positive outcome of how the 2020 pandemic has changed our world.