Image credit: Wall Street Journal
by James A. Bacon
Tech journalist Michael S. Malone makes the case in today’s Wall Street Journal that technologies nearing commercialization will revitalize the American economy. Just as fracking technology transformed the energy sector, nanotechnology, big data, three-dimensional printing and online education will create a new wave of abundance, he argues in “The Sources of the Next American Boom.”
Malone displays the same optimistic spirit of other tech utopians like Howard Kurzweil of “The Singularity Is Near” fame. Scientific knowledge is advancing so rapidly that material prosperity is almost guaranteed. Our biggest problem will be figuring out how to deal with all the affluence.
While I eagerly await the development of everything from nano-materials with super properties to 3D-printers that can turn my garage into a home manufacturing center — “honey, I’m running low on manganese, could you pick up a cartridge at the store?” — I also worry that technological change is hurtling forward so rapidly that it is outpacing the ability of human institutions to adapt.
As Alvin and Heidi Toffler observed in “Revolutionary Wealth,” different types of institutions evolve at different rates of speed. Businesses operating in a competitive, free-market environment adapt with the most alacrity, followed by nongovernmental, grass roots organizations. Labor unions, government bureaucracies and regulatory agencies lag behind, while schools, legal systems and governance structures remain embedded in institutional amber.
Paying little heed to this “desynchronization of change,” Malone writes optimistically about a resolution to the current affordability crisis in higher education:
The discrepancy between the cost of university tuition and the return on that investment for most students grows every year. As students, increasingly priced out of traditional education, begin to abandon the college path, colleges and universities will have no choice but to pursue them—with ever-greater numbers of virtual courses (and eventually degrees)—on laptops, smartphones and tablets. This shift is already beginning to transform higher education and bring in a host of new competitors. Its potential to raise educational achievements in K-12—where rising costs and diminishing results are even more out of control—could be even more revolutionary.
That is precisely the argument that I have been making, lo, these many years. And it is precisely the challenge, I have contended, that faces the University of Virginia, all other public institutions of higher education in the commonwealth and, indeed, higher education generally. However, we have seen the reaction at UVa to an effort — an ill-executed effort, I will concede — by the Board of Visitors to accelerate the rate of change in a venerable institution, and we have seen how powerful constituencies within the university defended their prerogatives on the grounds that top-down reform cannot be imposed upon the collegial, consensus-driven culture of academia.
But change waits upon no man. The college-affordability crisis is intensifying. While UVa held down its tuition and fee increases to 3.5% this year, the lowest in years, it still outpaced the rate of inflation and wage growth. (Other Virginia colleges jacked up rates even more aggressively.) All the while Moore’s Law is still driving down the cost of computing power and telecommunications, the quality of personal online interaction is improving and entrepreneurs are learning what works and what doesn’t. It is only a matter of time before the face-to-face interaction of the residential campus is replicated in holographic form.
Thus, two things are entirely predictable: First, that online entrepreneurs will gain educational market share. At present, the share of online educational enterprises is so small that rapid growth does not yet threaten established institutions, especially ones with strong brand names like UVa. But in time, the threat will grow. Thus, the second predictable thing is that powerful established institutions will utilize their massive resources and political clout to thwart the competition, just as teacher unions (and quasi-unions like the Virginia Educational Association) use their influence to thwart disruptive change to K-12 schools. Expect a legislative and regulatory backlash against career colleges, online schools and other upstarts on the grounds of protecting the “public.”
Even in our increasingly centralized political system, in which the federal leviathan intrudes into every sphere of human existence, including those functions once relegated to the states, regulation and oversight of K-12 and higher education remain resides primarily with the states. Virginia’s political class, like that of every state, eventually will be forced to deal with the educational crisis. Will our political class act to open up competition and technology, or will it seek to stymie the forces of change to protect the vested interests? One path leads to renewal, the other to stagnation. Which will it be?
