Disrupted higher ed: Less Harpo, more health care
Robert Tracinski, a Charlottesville writer, provides a concise and incisive overview of how technology will disrupt — if not demolish – the reigning model of higher education in this article in Real Clear Markets. He makes many good points (some of which I’ve made myself), but this is one that struck me:
The new medium will lead to some big innovations in the whole experience of higher education–a field whose basic structure hasn’t changed all that much since the first universities arose out of monasteries in the late Middle Ages.
One of the radical changes I think we will see is the decoupling of the humanities from technical and professional education. As it is, universities package together two forms of education with radically different economics. Scientific, technological, and professional courses teach skills that are judged by objective standards and have direct, measurable economic value.
The humanities, at best, have an economic value that is indirect and difficult to quantify. Perhaps it will make you more creative and a deeper thinker. Maybe Steve Jobs sitting in on classes in calligraphy helped inspire the Macintosh. But then again, the humanities departments are also packed with a bunch of charlatans who will waste your time with things like–well, here’s an example. Check out a hilarious review by Joe Queenan of an impossibly pretentious and utterly nonsensical academic tome on the deeper meaning of that important subject, Harpo Marx.
As someone who came out of the humanities departments–I have a degree in philosophy–I assure you that this sort of thing goes on all the time, and your tuition dollars are paying for it. Obviously, there is no reason why they should pay for it, so eventually they won’t.
— JAB
