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Technology & Ideas
At Tyler Cowen University, No One Would Have Tenure
If you could start
an institution of higher learning from scratch, what would it look like?
By
July 5, 2021, 9:00 AM EDT
Not every university needs to
look like this.
Photographer: Andy Lyons/Getty
Images North America
Tyler
Cowen is
a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. He is a professor of economics at George Mason
University and writes for the blog Marginal Revolution. His books include “The
Complacent Class: The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream.”
If you were to design a university from scratch, what might it
look like? The idea isn’t necessarily to have a model for other schools to
follow, but rather an experiment. Assume that various legal, contractual and
accreditation constraints do not stand in your way.
I would
start with what I expect students to
know. They should be
able to write very well, have a basic understanding of economics and
public policy, and a decent working knowledge of statistical reasoning.
I would give a degree to students who demonstrated “B-grade” competence in all
of these areas; what now goes for passing C-minus work wouldn’t cut it.
Most
important, the people who write and grade the students’ tests would not be
their instructors. So students would have to acquire a genuine general knowledge
base, not just memorize what is supposed to be on the exam.
Next, each
student would have the equivalent of a GitHub certification page. If you learned three programming
languages, for example, or won a prize in a science fair, that would go on your
page as a credential. But it would not count as a credit toward graduation. Some
students could finish their degrees in a year or two even if their pages were
not adorned with many accomplishments, while others might fill their pages but
get no degree.
My
imaginary school would not have many
assistant deans, student affairs staff or sports teams. The focus would be
on paying more money to the better
instructors. There would be plenty of humanities
classes, primarily aimed at helping students learn how to write well,
but the topics might range from Dante to hip hop. Students would have the
option of living on campus but not be required to do so, much as they do at my
current employer, George Mason University.
Instructors would not have tenure, but
would have to compete for students — by offering them classes and services
that would help them graduate and improve the quality of their certification
pages. Teachers would be compensated on the basis of how many students they
could attract, in a manner suggested long ago by Adam Smith, who himself lived
under such a system in 18th-century Scotland.
The very
best instructors could earn $300,000 to $400,000 a year. They might attract
students through their research, or with their active online presence, or
even by helping students negotiate online courses from other institutions; the
students themselves would judge the efficacy of those investments. Faculty
would also be paid for mentoring
students, as each student would choose a small circle of advisers to serve
as guides to the system.
The school
would hire online instructors too, many of them from poorer countries and
working at lower wages. So you might take French from a tutor in Senegal,
or have a high school teacher from Tamil Nadu read your essays and offer
writing tips. I am a big believer in face-to-face
instruction, but in my school it would have to compete with online
instruction. For this reason, I think my school would have a much more diverse faculty and instructional base
than any other institution of higher education. None of the instructors
would be required to have any undergraduate or advanced degrees.
The
university would also accept students
from the entire world, and charge them a modest mark-up over marginal cost.
Admission would be offered
to anyone who could navigate three months of modestly difficult prerecorded
online offerings, available initially for free.
Students from distant locales would be
restricted to the subsequent online offerings, perhaps supplemented by
locally organized study groups or some of the better courses at their local
universities. Their certification page would state their status as distance
learners, and the job market would decide how much less the online degree is
worth. If exam security were a problem in some areas, the school would
require those students to take their finals in statistics, economics and writing by traveling to the U.S.
This
school would probably not attract many of today’s Ivy League elite. But they
are not the ones who require better and cheaper alternatives. It is striking
how most major institutions of higher learning are many decades or centuries
old, and how reluctant they are to change their models or to become
significantly more inclusive.
Am I sure
that my “fantasy university,” if it ever became reality, would work? Of course
not. So I encourage you to come up with your own proposal. Because I am sure of
this: Higher education is in desperate need of more innovation, and there’s
room for more than one idea.
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