Will the Pandemic Blow Up College in America? – POLITICO

Galloways business-school colleague Hans Taparia, an expert on the food industry, opines that online classes will soon replace campus learning now that we have had the pandemic experience of taking courses while confined to quarters. When the worry about the virus disappears, he assures us, the benefits of asynchronous learning will remain.

Maybe soand its likely the pandemic really will shake something up about our higher-education establishment. There will be changes. There will be schools that go bankrupt. And the pandemic has unquestionably revealed some deep inequity issues with higher education, which the crisis gives us the opportunity and the incentive to get right.

When it comes to the end of college as we know it, however, weve seen this movie beforeand college has survived it. The last time America was swept by this particular combination of economic collapse and technophilia was in the wake of the financial crisis of 2008, and that too brought predictions of massive change to higher education. The book titles reflected the mood of the moment: Academically Adrift, College Unbound, The End of College, Higher Education in Crisis?

Following the model of disruptive innovation laid out by Clayton Christensen in the late 1990s, authors were confident that economic, social and technological factors would disintermediate traditional campuses. Christensen himself made this case in a 2011 book, The Innovative University. Technology was creating the future of learning, and one either got on board or went extinct. Education writers often made the pilgrimage to Silicon Valley, where all that money, all those gizmos and all that talk of the future made the inefficiencies of campus life seem at best quaint, and at worst pernicious. The mania of the moment was MOOCs, or massive online open courses, which looked set to displace college itself.

Theres a critique of college underlying all these promises, and the critics have a point. Theres no question colleges and universities in the United States are unusual institutions; their business models evolved in economies very different from our own. No other country has anything quite like Americas higher-education system. Elite schools are superexpensive (for those able to pay full fare); the great public institutions continue to serve hundreds of thousands of students from all walks of life while also sponsoring the most advanced research on the planet. In a culture and economy increasingly customizable so as to facilitate the most efficient transactions, universities bundle many different functions together, with high overhead, high personnel costs and long-standing rules and traditions. When colleges add technology to their operations, they dont reduce costs; they just increase expectations. And so, we are told, these are enterprises ripe for disruption.

But one persons inefficiencies are another persons opportunities. Colleges and universities dont just bundle different functions; they bundle different kinds of people together, too. On a university campus, classics majors sit next to economics majors in a neuroscience class or at a basketball game. This lived experience of diversity is unlike the rest of our very segregated society. And it offers the kind of serendipitous encounters that lead to transformative learning. Campuses arent just a collection of climbing walls and parties; theyre a rare venue for bringing together people open to discoveries about themselves and the world. Despite the warnings from Silicon Valley, students and their families want that campus experience, and see it as a critical part of ones life. Theres a reason why the best residential college campuses havent just survived over the past several decades, but have grown. Theres a reason why families today talk about the trauma of being sent home from school without finishing the semester.

Many colleges and universities have long been managing disruption, and even growing from it, rather than being victimized by it. This is especially true in regard to higher educations relationship to technology. Large tech companies have been heavily involved with higher education for years. Apple developed iTunes University in 2007, and many schools shared their content on its platform; the schools are still there, though iTunes U is being discontinued. Harvard-MITs EdX has been producing classes seen by millions of learners without putting any notable dents in Harvard or MIT. Stanford professors started Udacity and Coursera, and both companies have found a spot, if not quite sustainability, in the higher ed marketplace. Georgia Tech, Southern New Hampshire University, Berklee College of Music and Arizona State, to name just a sampling of schools, have developed powerful platforms for remote learning, often in some combination with in-person classes. Ive been teaching humanities classes on Coursera for several years, and have had more than 100,000 students in my classes. During the pandemic, more than a thousand people have joined the courses each week. But there is no sign that this appetite for online learning diminishes the interest in studying on campus. Universities learned this when they made classes available for free on the internet and applications still kept pouring in.

Right now, students who have been sheltering at home these past few months are clamoring to get back to campus. Many have reported that if their schools are fully online in the fall, they will take a break from education and find something else to do. The pandemic has demonstrated that faculty can deliver their courses online and students can grasp the materialbut its also abundantly clear that critical parts of the experience are lost when the learning community is dispersed.

The fact that tech wont be the disruptor doesnt mean that no disruption is needed right now. And the pandemic is helping clarify just how colleges should change. A popular phrase in this pandemic period is were all in this together, but its increasingly clear that the disease is having a disproportionate impact on poor and marginalized populations. Inequality, whether in terms of disparities in health care, underlying conditions or job security, is everywhere evident. And in America, equality is profoundly racialized, as Black Lives Matter activists and their allies have highlighted this summer, and will likely press as an issue as the semester gets underway.

Inequality remains the great problem facing higher education in the United States, and it is suddenly very visible on our screens for those who normally teach on campus. Displaced onto Zoom, teachers long accustomed to the equalizing environment of the classroom have been disconcerted by the disparities they see among homebound students. Their better-off students check in with new laptops, great Wi-Fi, and seem to study in posh surroundings; the less well-off struggle for access and privacyand any time to read while juggling the responsibilities they carry in their families.

Higher education can reinforce privilege and divisions, or it can be a vehicle for social mobility and cohesion. As we think about the return to campus, we can learn some lessons from the past few months. Colleges large and small have decided not to require standardized tests for admissions this year because of the challenges of testing during a pandemic. But some students, especially those from low income families, have long known that SATs and ACTs favor those with money for tutors and time for organized test prep. Nobody should go back to requiring these pseudo-objective exams.

As was the case in the summer of 2016, likewise in this election year, well hear again and again that progressive puritans (or illiberal liberals) are destroying free speech. Cancel culture has replaced political correctness as a label to affix to those one finds too radical, too weird or just too rude. Of course, there are examples of people unjustly fired or attacked for a perceived departure from campus orthodoxy, and university leaders must resist calls to punish divergent points of view. But underneath the argumentboth the callouts from the left, and the anxiety from conservatives and traditional liberalsis a real reminder that maintaining civil intellectual diversity takes work, and that a campus is exactly where we can build the habit of listening to those with views different from ones own.

Higher education should also have learned from this pandemic that the bubble of campus life is an illusion. Rather than seeing eight semesters away from home as a break from real life, colleges and universities should find more ways to connect their students to the towns they live in and to a country that needs their participation in public life. If students are attending their college from their hometown, they have even more opportunities to knit education and citizenship together. This can take the form of encouraging political participation at the local or national level as a part of a students education. During the pandemic, more than 300 schools have joined Wesleyan in E2020, a program to develop civic preparedness among our students so that they can participate more thoughtfully in the nations political institutions. This will be good for the students, their schools and the country.

Today, more academics can see the promise of hybrid or low-residency models that combine technology and in-person educational experiences; programs that reduce the time to degree can make good use of online classes to help students and their families save money. There should be nothing sacred about the academic calendar. When universities reopen their gates, they can complement the amplification of learning that campus provides with remote educational offerings and work experiences. Programs through which students work in business, the professions and not-for-profits can help ensure that ones education better prepares one for life beyond the university.

Such paths have already been charted by organizations like AmeriCorps, which has integrated national service with education. President Donald Trumps proposals to cut the Corporation for National and Community Service are exactly the wrong way to go. Instead, we need the federal government to incentivize more states to create their own programs to integrate education, job training and public service. Colleges and universities can support their states efforts to develop programs that incentivize teamwork, innovation, and civic preparedness beyond borders of campus. This isnt unbundling; its the construction of more paths for people eager to learn.

The closure of campuses over the past few months has forced us to confront what is most valuable about a college experience, and it would be a missed opportunity if the greatest thing we learned in this pandemic is how to better wash our hands. To the extent we can profit from this dismal experience, we should use it to build greater access to a broad, pragmatic education in which students learn deeply not only from the delivery of course material but from one another as well.

Weve had enough attempts at smug disruption, whether by anti-intellectual populists or technophilic prognosticators. No, the pandemic does not have to lead to an impoverished educational experience in the name of efficiency. If anything, the lived experience of social isolation is reinforcing the importance of interacting with others in physical proximityeven if you have to wear a mask.

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Will the Pandemic Blow Up College in America? - POLITICO