Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion 20150404

The cost of college combined with advancements in technology will lead to a fundamental transformation of our Higher Education system in the near future. Well, thanks and let me 2nd youre welcome to this great audience and our speaker and panel. The 1st thing i should say about kevin carey, probably the most important thing is that he is a graduate of the university of new york no doubt is at the root of much or all of his success. You can read about some of that success in your program, so i we will briefly recap his rise from being a state budget analyst in indiana washington policy analyst to education analyst who very quickly joined the top tier of education writers around the nation. He has written for the Washington Monthly the chronicle of Higher Education, and education, and many other publications. He now has a regular gig at the new york times. He makes his professional home at the new America Foundation and directly Education Policy Program there. Of course, the author of teenine, which will be talking about today. But i thought i would also tell you a few things you might not know about kevin because he contains multitudes. He has established a reputation for finding any excuse, and i really mean any excuse to write about education policy implications of shows like the wire and friday night life. You will find references to the matrix, alana turner, game of thrones and others that i have missed. I we will be disappointed if he did not at least mention better call saul. Also a music aficionado a student of the trapeze, and although they generally mildmannered guy i hope he does not make the mistake as i did of referring to the trapeze as trampolining. He also takes on unexpected topics ready a fine and educational topic about how learning Computer Programming made a better writer because he wrote writing is just coding by another name. And although he certainly sees himself as a man of the left, when policy preferences a line he is not afraid to make common cause with the right. He once he once wrote praising the higher ed program of then governor rick perry of texas and the headline was, rick perry, the Higher Education visionary. There there are some people in Higher Education who consider him a provocateur command maybe that is right provoking a system badly in need of selfexamination is a a big part i think of what kevin sets out to do. He says a lot about equity and opportunity and certainly does not mince words. In the end of college we read about the systematic tragedy of a grotesquely expensive secondary system that has shamelessly shamefully in difference undergraduate learning. To learning. To be fair, he is not just critical of universities. In his final in his final chapter he advises students, put down the bong and it worked. He is always worth listening to always worth debating and we will have both with a short talk reaction conversation from a great panel and finally audience questions. After that we will go to a reception outside where there will be books available for sale in signing. Please join me please join me in welcoming my friend and colleague. [applause] thank you for that wonderful introduction and thank you for coming. I am a proud suny graduate 1992. You can either feel pride or regret in that depending upon what you think of my book and the conversation we have today. It was Robert Hutchins, a very well known alum of the university of chicago who wrote in his 1930s book the idea of the university, a modern approach to thinking about Higher Education. The book begins along the lines of the most important thing to understand about the university is the confusion that sets it. In many ways the 1st part of my book, a history of american Higher Education is the story about confusion, where it came from and what it continues to me today. And i think i dont believe anything it says about the history of american Higher Education, really all that contested or controversial. I claim no original scholarship. Many of the ideas have been represented in books of Higher Education history but have been used for a long time. The book talks quite a a bit about how in the formational time of american Higher Education we decided or allowed to happen and organizational model that stuck together three essential purposes the Research University the mission of practical training represented in policies like the moral landgrant act and the broader ideals of liberal education. Not my framework. You can direct a seminal history of American Education and the emergence of the American Universitys to read or how that. And to and to me the interesting thing is that almost as soon as that happened people inside the academy looked at the system and said well that does not make a lot of sense to try to put together a Research University in the liberal arts college in an organization meant to train people for practical fields, the labor market all in one place. William james wrote an essay called the phd octopus where he made the commonsensical observation that the things you had to do in order to turn the phd had nothing to do with whether or not you were ever going to be good in the classroom. It was a sham a bubble dodge, which i think is the title of the 2nd chapter of my book meant to throw dust in the eyes of the public, to fool people into thinking that the university was something other than it was. Of course, one of the most famous college this is an american history. Dot great books and had a a career that went all the way into the end of the century. In his book theres a chapter called the phd optimist. Its but by that. It was much much too late for the University Organizational model to change. There is a wellknown phenomenon where once organizations become a a certain way they become more like one another over time. So the question that interested me was why it has persisted for so long. These kinds of things happen all the time. Eventually someone comes along with a new way of doing things in the world changes. Yet virtually every thing that Robert Hutchins said about the university in 1934 you could say about universities now 80 years later. I believe that it has a lot less to do with the virtues of the model and the inevitability of the Higher Education model as we know today then kind of an epic string of good luck that in some ways i do not think that we can expect to continue. He was, of course, a great virtue that the American University model was native american and not europe where many of the great Higher Educational institutions were decimated during the catastrophe at the beginning of the 20th century. Universities were in in ascendant Industrial Age a nation of a nation of immigrants were people were looking for me instead with theyre children and start colleges and universities is the way to do that. The 1st nation in the world to decide it will be a good idea to get everyone through high school a nation with the congress that in a sort of basic attempts to try to find something to do with returning veterans and they came back in world war ii why dont we send them to college. A nation that decided to fight the cold war by providing billions upon billions of dollars to Research Universities in order to conduct research necessary to compete with the soviet union. My argument is that that wave of money and enrollment and good fortune overwhelms whatever internal contradictions might have been theyre all along and that we are really only now in a time where in some ways those historical moments of good luck have receded. I will add one more the economy changes around us. There was a lot of social dissatisfaction, doubts and dissatisfaction, doubts inside the economy about whether the institution we continue. A famous book a famous book published in the early 1970s called the overeducated american were harvard economist predicted we were producing too many College Graduates and were about to enter a time in which wages will decline. Exactly the opposite happened because we were there in the midst of the industrialization and the transition from the society where you can earn an income with just a High School Diploma to the world we live in our you certainly cannot. The only organizations the only organizations that are allowed to issue those credentials the only organizations that are allowed to act as public subsidies are colleges and universities as we have known. I feel i feel that the flaws of been there for a long time to mull of but the consequences and stakes are higher than before. The same internal contradictions borne out in most of the research a lot of us are familiar. Its very interesting. The sort of foundational math and reading skills. Including, i. Including, i should say other countries they graduate more people from college, not less in the average graduate does not look good compared to his or her peers no you countries. All of that i would argue is at root a function of confusion that causes institutions to not take their essential mission to provide rigor and coherence and attention to their undergraduate Educational Mission as seriously as they are to. Information technology intersects with the longterm trend and the rest of it is talking about how things have changed, how there are all kinds of things possible now that were not possible even a few years ago. I now is that by talking about this i join a long and kind of ignoble roster of people who have predicted that every new part of Information Technology would surely overthrow the college as we know it. Its but i believe fundamentally that this time is different. The kind of informationtechnology is different then when than when the best we could do was have college on radio or college over Cable Television the nature of interim activity with the competition will power, the ability to create authentic human communities and the combination of a virtual space and the real space is much, much different than it used to be. So we both have the opportunity to create learning environments that are actually substantially better than some of the learning environments the Students Experience now and and i we will pause and urge everyone, as we talk about the nature of learning to keep in mind the large distinction between the consensus view of what the best learning environment is and what the learning environment that most College Students actually experience in most institutions. I would argue there is a large distance between the two. If we are going to think about what is possible in the future we cannot say, well, this, that, or the other commit could never be as good as my memory of my one great class that i had in college because we tend to remember the one great class and not the very many unmemorable educational experiences that we had in often it was more of the latter than the former. And the other thing we need to think about is the basic issue of how not only can we do better educationallys we can do the same for more people for less money which is important. We we cannot ignore the economics of Higher Education in all of this. As part of the book i took a look, a word i think everyone became instantly tired of hearing a few years ago, something that went through the kind of classic cycle of over praise and disappointment, but nonetheless i believe represents a very very Important Development on American Education. Mostly it is a narrative device. I took an entire mit genetics class. I do not represent my learning experience of anything other than myself. Learners are different in different ways. What i think is noteworthy about the fact that i took this mit genetics class is that one thing i am sure of is that my experience was in no important way different than the experience of the students taking the same class in cambridge massachusetts. It is a very straight forward approach that they use for introductory classes at mit which is one of many courses a lecture based class. I think that we have all in some ways learned to denigrate the lecture as bed bad pedagogy. Good lectures can be really good. This was a lecture taught by a man a man named eric lander who helped the human genome project teaching the introductory to biology which is essentially introductory genetics. He is he is as uptodate in the field as is possible to be. So in cambridge massachusetts, 100 students took this class. They taped the lectures. Two weeks later later tens of thousands of people around the world watched the same lectures, did exactly the same problem sets homework assignments, exams. I went to cambridge. I was curious. Is there something i am am missing my not being there . I interviewed the students afterwards to get a sense of how they took the class. I interviewed eric. I wanted to be sure that i was right. What they told me was the same thing. I went to the lectures. Lectures. I went back and talked to my fellow students, which i could easily do. I worked hard on the problem sets which is the core of the learning experience and that kind of introductory science class, and i took the exams. That is how they teach the class at mit and you can replicate that perfectly at a marginal cost. Probably cost 100,000 to produce the class. They put it out there, and now anyone can take it for free. The combination, i think, the fact that we can reach so many more people for so much less money and in certain important elements of Higher Education the fact that the reach of Information Technology continues to expand that we can predict confidently the smart people and places in places like stanford and Carnegie Mellon who have been trying hard to put together narrow neuroscience and cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence and to really serious attempts to make the experience of learning in a Technology Enabled environment much more than what i did. We can predict with confidence certain trends will continue in certain directions. Our use will continue to improve. The genie is out of the bottles. American colleges and universities putting their good name behind these educational experiences and when you put that together and that is what produces my characterize in the book as the university of everywhere. Here is what, i mean specifically. I have i have a daughter four and a half but to turn five. And the question was what will college be like when she attends . Issue is turning 18 today she would have two options go to a Traditional College or university or engage in some kind of mostly purely online version that would not be as good. So she would go to the traditional one. Fifteen years from now and she goes to college here is what i think will be different. She will have the option of going to a traditional institution, many of which will be still trying to charge even more money and compete viciously with one another with the very last full pay student out there. Out of state, overseas. There will be i dont even want to say online because i think i think that our sense of what online means will change quite a lot. He cannot assume that the future, the nature of interacting with technology 20 years now is going to be like this system we do now it will evolve in ways that will be more human, not less then we have the opportunity to create knew Higher Learning organizations that provide all of the hugely important yet not quite as specific intangible benefits that belong to an authentic human learning community. People will still want to leave home and go somewhere and have what i had to live among others my age have comingofage experiences go out on weekends learned some things. They will still want to do those things but you can create places that provide that experience and take advantage both pedagogically and economically of the immense wealth of Educational Resources that will be available Via Technology and put them together into an organization that i think we both more effective and less expensive. You are you are not going to have to pay the increasingly high toll for admission to these walled gardens of learning we have erected to get a College Education. In many in many ways the traditional model is fundamentally a product of scarcity. If you want to get a College Education you need access to three things, be worthy of the students are, beware be work radical mass of scholars and mentors and teachers were and to be someplace that can afford to take you take advantage of the best Information Technology of the time which was the printed book, and all those things cost money. It cost money to build the place where you can have students and people. Because that had to be scarce we have all internalize the idea of scarcity. This notion that we should judge colleges by how many people they dont let him. We are right now in the middle of making a very profound transformation from a time of scarcity to a time of abundance and Education Resources and i think that that will change fundamentally whats possible and what will become not just here in the United States but around the world. Probably the probably the single most important thing that happens on planet earth is the declining global poverty. Poverty. In 198052 percent of all of the people on earth were below the poverty line. That number is down around 20 percent. So the kind of middle ground estimate is between now and 2,033,000,000,000 people will join the global middle class. That is more that is more than have ever been to college and all human history. The 1st thing you want for your children once you can provide safety and health care and food and shelter is education. We cannot educate we cannot educate those 3 billion people by building millions of america style colleges and universities. We can barely afford to do that here. This is not just going to happen. The university of everywhere is not just going to be in our own society. In many ways it will be these fight fantastically growing and dynamically developing societies they will not ask themselves is questions about what we do with the old institutions and that will be a reality that we can take advantage of and we need to be aware of. So i am optimistic. There is an opportunity for american Higher Education institutions which are the unchallenged leaders in Global Learning to be the leaders in Global Learning in the future. We will have to look outward, not in word. A much broader sense of possibility and i think that it can happen and emanate from Public Institutions. I fundamentally believe that in the public purpose and public good of Higher Education we need more institutions and better institutions and institutions that are much less confused that may have been. I appreciate you taking the time to listen. [applause] thank you very much, kevin. It was a great start. [inaudible conversations] i guess i we will start from up here. Joined by four panelists. Very fortunate to have them. Comes from quite a different background which i thought would be a useful way to get different responses to what kevin had to say today and in his book. Recently provost. She has an interdisciplinary appointments a literary scholar by background for visiting scholar at mit, stanford a leading voice a leading voice on the issues of emerging forms of digital scholarship as well as the changing role of humanities in the digital age which i hope you will touch on this afternoon as well as she is referred chronicle of Higher Education. Most recent book is are we the area. 1995. An expert and a lot of things. An awardwinning teacher and his most recent book is called college, what it was is command should be. The pleasure of reading and reviewing. He writes regularly for the new york review of books and other places in on American Literary topics, religious history many, many different areas. In 2,011 he was awarded a National Humanities medal by president obama. To my immediate right Vice President for policy research and strategy as well as the head of the center for policy analysis at the American Council on education in washington dc. More than 20 years of experience in Postsecondary Education including significantly a lot of experience in workforce related education. Before that he was director of the Postsecondary Program at the center for American Progress washington think tank, as you know. Before that director of Business Development in rhode island and was director of education and training for the Rhode Island Technology council. Appointed by arnie duncan secretary of education in 2011 to serve on the board the fund for the improvement of Postsecondary Education. Last but definitely not least nancys infer chancellor of the State University of new york the nations largest comprehensive system of Higher Education with nearly half a Million Students that would compare with about 2500 students. And i want to say five or 6,000 undergraduates in columbia. Yes. So very large system. Since she became chancellor she has become a local advocate for legislative reform to try to ensure the continuation a broad access at a time when we all no there has been declining states. Interested in highlighting the role in catalyzing Economic Development in the state. Active in many state, local national organizations, and national organizations, some areas the particularly interest or are teacher preparation which is something that suny is working on right now. Also interested in womens education, University Community engagement and much more. Before she came to suny she was the president of the university of cincinnati, chancellor at the university of milwaukee in the executive dean of the professional college and dean of the college of education at ohio state. All that said what i have asked the panelists to do and i we will sit down and join them give their full attention. And i want kevin to give his quick reaction. Questions and there you have it. Okay. Is this machine working . So, high, and thank you for coming in thank you for the book. That excellent interaction. I often feel i am invited to this conversation as curmudgeonly the center. There you go. How about that. I was right. Right. I we will try not to be that. Slide into it. We have been admonished to five minutes which i we will try i we will try to stick close to and make five points. First, i just want to say that i agree with a great deal of what kevin said in his opening remarks that we have experienced a scandalous educational system reconsidering them and should be careful about this distance between nostalgic ideal memories of our best College Experience and that sorry reality that is often the case in that we need to experiment. And i think that kevin makes a good case for why previous technologies in which people invest a lot of hope Radio Television the returns are not quite in have not delivered on their promise. So, the 1st issue i think i want to acknowledge that his book has provocative and smart points and belongs to a genre that included as well as other books. Some years ago called doityourself universities. Very scholarly william bone growth lectures on High Education in the digital age and i do not mean this disrespectfully but as a literary person it must come to terms. My sense is that the genre most comfortably ploys and Science Fiction. Science fiction is great sometimes the predictions turn out to be right. Space travel radio and credit cards and a lot of what is in his book may be correct, but i do not think that we know that, and i think we want to be helpful. The vision is an optimistic one. Second, maybe a slightly more substantial part kevin suggests, if i read correctly that we have learned a great deal in the last 20 years or so about how cognitive science has made a great deal of difference. I am on thin ice year. But when i am reading the book that education is a deliberate process of rewiring your brain i am reminded a chapter on habit in the book principles of psychology in which essentially says the same only his metaphor is water and pipes rather than signals going through wires. He says. He says learning is about removing obstruction the one little until they are swept out of the way and we have created a Natural Channel of understanding. I also think socrates says something about how the mind works which is why he preferred the format of asking questions and making statements because he understood that people engage actively with questions. So i am not challenging anything that kevin says about how we learn, but i am skeptical about whether we know more about it than we once did. The 3rd issue and here the ice is even thinner because i am certainly no economist to read i am not i am not persuaded that we know that the technology will bring cost savings. Might. There are arguments that it will but at the same time we are were going to do the things that kevin wants us to do, maintain and remove continually which we try to do now by framing new generations of teachers which is an expensive process and not a very effective on. The premise with the promise is that Digital Technology will allow us to do this better and more cheaply. I am not convinced so far. It looks like we we will lead a lot need a lot of well compensated, highly trained people to update technology all the time. The 4th issue is i have no idea how the vision in kevins book or indeed any number of other books connect to what i do to humanistic education which is not the same thing as liberal education because liberal education includes science and technology would humanistic education has, at its core debate about values and interpretation. It it may very well be a failure of my imagination. I cannot grasp how until we get to the time were a machine is indistinguishable from a human being can conduct the kind of education. And finally again not meant to be any kind of skepticism about his sincerity or commitment to the idea that there is a great democratizing power in these technologies in that we have been scandalously neglectful in bringing Educational Opportunity to everyone in our society, not to mention the globe but i worry that we may be embarking upon a road that we will lead to greater stratification rather than less stratification that we may be heading to a world where the wealthy or the affluent, the privileged will continue to go to relatively traditional institutions. I expect that your four and a half yearold daughter will apply not only to a Traditional College but early decision. And kids with fewer resources and opportunities will be online but i take the. That online may mean something very different than what it means now. Thank you. Lets turn it over. I am someone i am someone who is myself interested in technology and the possibilities that technology offers. There is a lot in his book i appreciate in the way that it challenges us as educators to think creatively about the ways in which technology inevitably is changing and will change the kind of education we offer. There is a lot that is exciting but the possibilities in front of us and if there is one thing most useful about this debate the ways in which it changes, it focuses changes, it focuses his attention and we have not seen in decades. That is all very exciting. I think it presents a lot of opportunity for those of us in education. At the same time it will surprise you. I am a liberal arts college president. Colleges work really well. They are worth further debate and have more time to spend on. The 1st discipline, the 1st discipline, technology is not only going to be better but less expensive and solve the problems we all wrestle with and trying to make it accessible and affordable. We focus on trying to keep cost down and raising as much money as we can lots of things we could do better but we are a Nonprofit Organization not making money on what we are offering and still have a hard Time Offering it at an affordable level. So imagine what happens when forprofit entities enter into the marketplace. A forprofit organization is moving quickly into job training because it is a lot more money making committee eventually hard, in fact impossible to make money offering Higher Quality education of the kind we would like our children to experience which is why we rely so heavily upon the plan to the of those who have recognized what they received an offer that back. After you have gotten the value of the product you purchased. You become one of the alums that writes the check that makes it possible to offer scholarships. I dont see that in technology currently. Typically cost many thousands of dollars to develop and it is worth the while to establish the kind of grant supremacy that they already haves and to maintain it. I we will be surprised at 20 years and now there is enough money even at harvard to offer everything they have for free without charging everyone and the idea that it would be available is an attractive one, but i think it is optimistic speaking as someone who spends time on budgets. They will not subsidize free courses for the rest of the world forever. It will be a budget item you look at and say, why are we spending money . The economic premise is problematic. As someone who has been decades working with students the picture kevin paints of himself and by extension a kind of educational entrepreneur who can go out and find the things that they want instead of net them together into an experience that is the unbundled combination of things that they found separately again, a wonderful again, a wonderful idea not typical of the 17, 18, 19 and 20 yearolds. They come specifically wanting and needing advice. Generation of the information out there. Students come not for information but for our capacity to help them make sense of it and sorted into a curriculum and to offer advice, guidance, and support. That process of generating the information out there is i would maintain different from inviting them to go out and find the world. World. Many students who do wonderfully that way. Wonderful success stories. That is 1 percent or 2 percent of the students out there. The rest the rest of the ones who need a certain amount of help and guidance. Finally, the 3rd thing i take issue with is the premise that place does not matter. For those of us who work at Residential Colleges colleges, the kind of things that go on across the institution outside the classroom are things that we think of as fundamental to the student growth and development as individuals. But we do in the classroom we like to think of as so important to the kinds of leadership opportunities the social development and as someone who talks to employers looking for a capacity. Many people would say necessarily improving. Getting to live, getting to live, work with, and study alongside people different than themselves is one of the most important benefits we offer. Well i hope and expect institutions like my own would learn and i am not sure i see it as an either or model. I hope that we will see a hybrid model where we will adopt technology and it will be a part of a learning community. So, okay. Good. Okay. So, one of the things i appreciate in the book other than the table of contents one of the chapters written about fusions. I thought you well laid out the overlaying of technology socialization the way that we have come to think about what colleges. I i think a lot of the things in the book, the history of college when colleges got started in western europes they were quite different than what they are today. There is an evolution and i would posit that whether you whether we believe in your future or not the continued evolution maybe something that looks quite different from what we look like today and today looks like from the university of big on you. You know i have worn a variety of hats of my career policy research worked at the state level. I thought i wanted to take on some of those different dimensions in reading kevins book. By way of my observations one of the rich things about kevins exploration of learning and technology in the book really talks about its relational Quality Technology and our interaction with it tends to begin with actually help people learn and how it can improve the way that people learn. I dont think i dont think that kevin provides his natural conclusion for what that we will lead, but it is a deep question for us to think about. I am aware of randomized controlled trials that show the Students Learning with enriched environments are doing better than students in selective institutions having better learning outcomes. That is what i think the question itself is one that we must appreciate in a a way that whether it leads to a hybrid approach are not we should take seriously that it can be in the relational quality of learning. Cognitive science supports that and we should take seriously that question. This question of Learner Agency call when it when is it exactly that someone has enough magna metacognitive skills along with a deep enough pool of a certain discipline or they are studying that they have some agency. Agency. I dont think we study that often enough. That is the cognitive science part. On the policy side and student demographic side only 20 percent of students go to school fulltime and live on residential campuses 73 percent of all students do not fit that profile. The average age of Program Students has been going out. The idea serving, looking for that kind of experiment is no longer the reality and that demographic shift is as much an issue in feeding into the world that kevin posits for us. We we focus often we think of innovation and technology drucker when he was exploring innovation himself more of the tramped the primary drivers was technology and it will drive the institutional changes and were seeing that demography here. The way the way those folks need to learn because the balance a variety of things, work, life, education how they balance that and the way that the university of error allows them to balance that will push demand for that. From a state policy perspective and more broadly for a policy perspective 1st, the higheroadly for a policy perspective 1st, the higher ed act we have been also forming what we think colleges. Program integrity, the credit hour. Lets realize that it is a conscious construct that we created. Policy can change that. Society may. Finally by way of an example you represent membership organizations. One of the fascinating things for me reform oriented societal change has been to watch institutions doing hard work wrestle with that change and to make it the policy. At the federal level it allows enhanced education to allow institution to experiment. Called experimental sites. It has been fascinating to watch their dialogue. Trying new pedagogical models, not branded. Ch of the skepticism comes from prestigious institutions that if one could say our winning the current lottery. And it has been fascinating for me to watch that happened because it is not a pressure being applied from outside the academy but the academy struggling with itself for what does the pedagogy look like. That was framed by a policy change. I think that these questions are in play. We dont have to believe his view of the future to look at some of the facts that he posits for us and not believe that there is a change afoot and the academy is struggling itself to figure out what it means and what is going to look like in the future. Thank you and welcome. I assure you that we do not want to lose our jobs. I also not only think kevin is onto something he got me to stop my luncheon and read the book. It was provocative for me. I love the history of Higher Education and have begun to think that we are the 2nd iteration of the system. As it turns out california was intended to articulate. One of one of the uniqueness is of the State University of new york is that we have an easy relationship between Community Colleges all the way to medical school, and it is a a fascinating opportunity and in many ways an experiment. I like that. Secondarily the middle section of the book was about examples. You may recall online using the cognitive science information. We did no harm. It turns out they did pretty well and we learned a ton about teaching and learning in that process and i we will come back to that. And i actually think i love books that give you a massive wake up call and i think you have done that for us. On the flipside i think there is a relatively rarefied few of Higher Education. I belong to an Organization Called the National Association system had 44 44 systems across 44 states that have the Statutory Authority to hire president s, assess and evaluate the work that the systems are doing and educate 75 percent of the undergraduate population. I have to translate what you are trying to tell us into what we are trying to do. Which is to educate more people and educate them better. We have done something to blur the lines. Very riveted on conclusions. I think you are being told by some of the respondents to the book Credit Opportunities are really was going to turn the corner here. People are going to want to exhibit what they have learned in some fashion and i cannot agree with you more that the transcript simply does not follow the story and that we have lost a lot of information about what our learning activities are provided us. Through Digital Learning we have opportunities to connect the k12 system with the Higher Education system. Students are taking 30 to 60 credit hours in high school. The 1st thing about your daughter is issue will probably only be in high school for a couple of years and starting college much earlier. The Delivery System will help that better connect. It is also still the case is so many students come to college totally in there. We know not yet, but i can imagine that our are Delivery System will be immensely enhanced if we could enable a faster pace to Developmental Education into collegelevel courses using a digital Delivery System. Last weeks students the cost savings are not on the side of how much or how few number of faculty members we will have but having the student use his or her time to get to the credentialing they are seeking. You have experiences but access to literally hundreds of fully online degree programs. Thousands of programs that can be delivered. A rapid prototyping. Finally beginning to think about digital Delivery Systems allow us to provide. And time to degree or credential is a massive cost saver one semester you dont have to take. And i think it will help drive completion. Given that we are engaged in a massive open initiative right now, we have not found 1 penny of savings and do not have the ability has yet to reduce the cost of tuition. But we are not the average college you have been looking at. Our tuition is relatively affordable, totally predictable and certainly students doing their part. But completion leads to success, and here is another additional opportunity. We want every one of our students to have an applied learning opportunity. 465,000 students doing something to apply theory into practice, and again i think of digital connectivity with business and industry which can enable students to have a more integrated learning experience, experience learning experience that is both theoretical and practical. Over over time it will allow faculty to finally engage in what we began to think about there is a scholarship of teaching and learning and the digital age is telling is more about how kids learn, how fast learn, how fast they learn, how ready they are to readdress their confusion than anything we have been able to do. We just know more about teaching and learning but my big suggestion would be this really is about equity access, and i would like to see volume number two stress that the Delivery System i guess what i am worried about is that the residential campus will only be for those who can afford it. I think there were about 25 new points made and so if i dont respond to some of them please feel free to bring them up again and asked me. I havent thought about the book is Science Fiction but i think you might be onto something. Im going to choose to take that as a compliment. Im a big fan of Science Fiction and sometimes you can write about the future in ways that look at the presence in new ways. I actually agree that to some extent the science is catching up with our intuition and insight about learning that has been with us for eons and so i dont actually believe that we know so much more 20 years then we did 20 years about what good education is. If think the scientific races is starting to catch up with us in the theoretical basis for it. The question of the humanities is an interesting one. To some extent from a baseline level you could say if technology cant do anything to change the nature and cost of humanities education it would still change quite a lot and that would be in and of itself something to aspire to. And this is an important point. We tend to speak and have very strong yet somewhat vague aspirations for exposing american College Students to a rich humanities curriculum. I think we come nowhere near doing that in practice and too often in these conversations our elected aspiration substitute for whats really going on. We are delivered in a society where only a small number of privileged people have access to a good humanities education. We have never lived in any other kind of society. So i didnt really talk about this in my remarks but after thinking through the different purposes of Higher Education i dont think it makes sense to try to think about what we need to provide for someone to have a start in their lives as productive citizens and workers in the same way at all as a kind of education that allows them to lead the good life and be a light to people. I think they are very different processes. Far and away the most common degree offered is that bachelors degree in business. There isnt even a close second. Is a 25 . Its an enormously high number. That makes perfect sense. We have made a transition from bluecollar economy to whitecollar economy in parts of the economy that people would like to be in it i think those business majors are a lot of young men and women who are going to college more or less as a matter of course because they were told to or there was no real other thing to do at that point in their lives. They very logically want jobs in the whitecollar economy is so up i want a job in business i will major in business. They are not getting a education. I dont think you could look at their experience and say they are getting anything even close to it. Andy delbancos really good and i would recommend it to everybody. It influenced my relying on Carmen Newman spoke i couldve used your book about what a good liberal Arts Education are just as well but if you read near the beginning of your book you thoughtfully tried to say as full full as youre able heres what i think the College Education to provide and when i read that for the first time i thought was i believe in all of this. Theres no way to do this in four years. You just cannot be done. For years as an arbitrary number that is just rooted vaguely in history. It has a lot to do with where people are in their lives and if you are really going to authentically try to be calm exposures up to the humanities i think thats a lifetime project trade i dont think you ever get there. I think its a way you live your life. And so part of what i see in the future is there will be opportunities to maybe if you want to get into the whitecollar economy doesnt take four years of what you really want is to acquire skills and knowledge to get the first job and if he asked students why they are going to college that is why they are going to college. If you ask them thats why they are going and maybe you could be part of a learning community and a learning process that goes on for five or 10 or 20 years and it really is her lifetime humanities education. Its the sort of odd thing where one of the grated manages colleges have is they are one of the very few sources of tribal identity in a mobile world. But we format identity mostly around useful comingofage experiences and then relationships with professional sports teams and like kind of periodic begging for money over the rest of your life. Its not really an educational relationship once students graduate because we think they are finished even though if we take humanities education and liberal education seriously they are in no way finished. One point i would like to make is i am not a subscriber to the idea about what college will bring us. I absolutely believe that people need and crave and want to educational work to be part of educational communities. I dont think attending the university of everywhere will be a solitary experience. They need that duration and they need that guidance and support. But i would argue an organization that is curating everyones process is very different than an organization that is only curating the classes that they themselves apply. This is explicitly, that is what i meant when i talk about the third option. I think we can create learning organizations that provide all of the mentorship all of the support for as nancy said very correctly the vast number of students who are not out of dyed acts to come into their Higher Education experience in many cases with serious deficits of elementary and secondary information. They need mentorship. We cannot leave them alone with their computers. That is in no way the vision im trying to promote with this book. But i think you can create an organization that can do all of those things but isnt in the business of recreating the essential content and the essential educational processes for the 5000 or so classes that make up almost all of the credits that are taught in american colleges but rather access those things technologically. Thats a very different economic model and a different pricing model. Its different in lots of ways. Thank you. I want to come back to all the classes and why dont we understand classes of 5000 or less. First i want to try to i want to talk about the hybrid university. Your whole premise which everyone seems to like and dont like anything else, so first of all you say there are too many alternatives to hybrids earlier in the book. By the end you are saying most students dont attend hybrid so i wonder probably the bigger question Teaching Research training professional training all put together under one roof. Which kevin says this is thing that happened unintentionally over time with deleterious results especially for teaching and learning. What do you think . I will ask andy since you are Research University. Is it such a bad way to organize university . Kevin said some kind things about my little book. Any idea what should be a good way. Kevin kindly mentioned by book which i quote at chemist at cornell who wrote a wonderful article called Research Strategy strategy. Teach. By which he meant if you want to keep your mind alert and teaching the introductory course at m. I. T. And changing it every year year if he wants to stay on your toes there a few things that are more valuable than being in a room with curious undergraduates who will walk out and challenge yourself to convey complex material and that way that a well they want sophisticated student can understand. In reality we all know it doesnt work area often that way the misfit as kevin said undergraduate education in the Research Mission of the University Like mine is pretty glaring. Allison. One of the things that has to date knowledge about Higher Education is there are lots of different set yours and institutions. They all have a different balance. They all have some aspect of balance. The balance of research and teaching is different. I would argue its a strong balance because the research to support the teaching in one of the most important dimensions of teaching that has changed over the last decade or so is a strong emphasis on under it undergraduate education on independent research the idea that people can become like grad students. They can be in a lab working alongside faculty. Thats the kind of thing you really need individual mentoring and individual attention to do. When i think about the difference between learning on line and alongside people in the subscribe setting one of the major differences is the mentorship of following the intellectual journey journey of someone he would fire. What draws a student into the field saying i cant believe the guy find this stuff fascinating. There has to be something to it he he loves us so much in being part of that intellectual journey. I would argue the balance of teaching and research is the heart of the package that shouldnt become unbundled. Thats not all the same by as being top by future college who are actively engaged in the field. I think we separate those than the stratification that nancy talked about where some students will go to the brandname schools that have the top researchers and other people will be taught by adjuncts who are receiving that information on line and grading student papers. Realistically how many students at the vast number of universities and colleges are attended by most americans how many are working sidebyside with researchers with whom they can do projects . Well i think the definition of researcher has to change. We are trying to say in the five sectors that live at sunni there are many forms of research. We need to get over what it means to be the Research University as strictly a human or shipboard therefore sought after. And we try to to engage with in a Community College faculty members in the activity of inquiry and asked the students at Community Colleges have placements with researchers. So i think the best of this is that well break down the barriers among and between the traditional definitions of Research Teaching and service. They are at thinking is that need to be redefined. And i believe as you do integrated trade. You are the only person here i think that doesnt work for a college or university so from the outside would he think . Is this effective . Would it be better to go back to this class . Is it better to have a standard in the Ad Department . Heres the 3000 standardized education courses and if you want to get student student loan money bets we have to use . I think i will try it this way. In europe a few years back there was an initiative across the European Countries called the bologna process to develop common ways of thinking about competencies that would be implied by masters degree level programs baccalaureate and equivalent trade it was modified slightly brought to the u. S. With the foundation funding. These Sisters Association is working on how you actually, it has created something called the greek qualifications profile that posits competencies at the associate bachelors and masters level of programming. That was developed in the academy. Its being tested at the disciplinary communities and all those things now. What i would positive when you begin to develop that level of way of thinking about competencies lets say chemistry for example you have some set of competencies you believe are common to Associates Degree or bachelors degree and masters degree. Decided by the disciplinary community not institution by institution. You want to common core Higher Education . Im not saying that all but what one im positing is the community itself is starting to wrestle with that very question. Are we going to discover at the end of that journey that there are 4200 institutions postsecondary institutions that receive money from the federal government should do title iv. Are we going to discover their 4200 different ways of teaching to those competencies as an Associates Degree . Maybe they wont be one but maybe there will be 100. Maybe there will be 200 work most effectively or 1 Million Students. Those kind of questions are natural in the evolution of any Institutional Forum or in the institutional system. As i work with provost and talk to them about this changes what i suggested them is dont just stop because of the fear of redefining things. Be curious about what it means to go that next step review asked to your students to do it. Be curious about whats on the other side of that conversation. And the other thing and thats a real question that i think kevin and the university up everywhere posits so for many institutions that dont have significant endowments one of the things that hides in the hybrid is the crosssubsidy. Which is you have hundreds and hundreds of students in Lower Division courses that then subsidize other work upstream. If its true that some of those Lower Division courses cant be done pretty well now remember not the ideal version of those courses but you have 600 students packed into psychology 101. You never see the faculty member. You work with te as that are well prepared to do that. Their become ways to deliver that education what happens to the crosssubsidy lacks the Financial Model of many institutions depend on that crosssubsidy. If even 30 of janet courses currently there initiatives to redesign at least that many. Kevin would know better than i. If you get some of those and you can do it and the Carnegie Mellon work that nancy cited shows you can do that with at least 60 of them what happens to the crosssubsidy and the Financial Model that supports the way the hybrid model works now . Thats a great segue and i want you to respond to one more round. This raises the question of involvement which everyone talks about. Kevin doesnt use the word a lot actually but its the root of a lot of what you discuss, trying to separate the functions of Teaching Research essentially should be off somewhere else, assessment credentialing the badge idea which i hope we will talk about a little bit which is quite interesting. I guess i will start with allison. Again this comes to the question of its a little bit like the hybrid idea but its not only the hybrid. Kevin and i were talking earlier on the way over here about the idea that maybe youre counseling functions ought to be unbundled. Maybe theres an organization thats really good at counseling and does it for colleges and use it for outsourcing just like some people outsource their cafeteria stuff to set accept. For a place like lafayette small and intimate and very distinctively rooted in place obviously what he think of unbundling . Could you get somebody else to grade exams or an external entity . Pack certainly unbundling under the oldfashioned term of outsourcing is one of the costcutting measures that a lot of the sought after 2008. A lot of us have parts of the campus like Food Services that used to be internal are now bon appetit. A lot of people outsource the help desks of people that call for i. T. Help might be talking to someone who has becomes wellversed in what the staff has to offer. I think you can take that in a lot of directions but and i speak mostly for my sector and dont claim to be representative all sectors by the student comes to Residential College part of what makes it work is not just that theres a dean that some of him but the dean shows up at the basketball game enters imam. The dean knows more about them than that they are number 12 on the ticket. They know something about where they live in who their friends are. It enhances the learning process. For a place like lafayette at what about suny . We do what allison does. We outsource things that could save us time more time to spend and to spend it in a highimpact strategies that support students. If you look at the work of george koo from Indiana University and how it got translated into a set of highimpact strategies they are about nurturing advising creating pathways which they are not in the hybrid situation we will have to do on line paper going to have to figure out how either through on line mechanisms or in person we can get students the supports they say they need and that you can do more of it you can get other Services Done by someone else. I wanted to add one thing and its important to understand economic argument. Thats the most expensive part of college. If thats the part thats most important the information can be brought in lots of different ways that somebody sitting down and listening to a student talk about why they are having a hard year and sending them to five different offices for advice whether a person on campus or someone on line a lot of us are doing counseling at times. It doesnt get less expensive if it involves highly trained competent human beings. I just want to say quickly that think the word outsourcing has come. We ought to knowledge and i think this buttresses kevins view that we are at a crisis point and we need to rethink this. We are outsourcing teaching. That is when i was a graduate student 65 of the american professoriat was either tenuretrack or tenured. Today its the other way around. Many institutions and i dont mean this to be blaming or pointing the finger at facing economic realities. We are depending more on teachers who are not fully part of it who are already part of the unbundling process. That is teachers working on mull to pull institutions, teachers that dont have the time to spend with students in a way that an onsite fulltime faculty member could do. So as long as we are talking about the present as well as the imagined future we have to acknowledge that this is happening and its a very big problem. Its also why adjunct faculty are advocating for recognition. Our arrogance has stratified people who deliver what they deliver in ways that has not been particularly useful to the parttime faculty. We have to find a new definition of that as well. Cabman. A couple of thoughts. Nancy referenced the experiment that was done with the Carnegie Ellen so this was done through Good Research organization. Bill bowen author of the cheaper river were the most influential Higher Education researchers probably of our time wrote a very good book called Higher Education in the digital age. Notably bill bowen was sort of the second author. He was his mentor and he had been spectacle that you could use technology which posits a certain kinds of laborintensive organizations will always become more expensive because they cant take it damaged but the productivity of technology but they are competing with other organizations and society that cam. They are destined to become more expensive and much less productive. After conducting this experience he said experiment is that im a believer now. They took a statistics class which is a class taught at many universities randomly assigned some students to a traditional class and other students to a much more technologybased class and found no differences. I think this is noteworthy. No differences along the spectrum of student background. It wasnt as if there was justice privilege students who did well. So that classes available for any college to adopt. How many colleges and universities after reading to bowens research decided to use technology to save money by replacing their introductory statistics class with that class class . I believe the answer is zero. Zero. Thats because we have a very individualistic view of the responsibility for education. We assign classes to single people so if you are going to replace that class, you were taking someones job away. Maybe its an adjunct maybe its a tenured professor but its a real person who has an association with that class. One of the things i talked to eric lander about is this idea of how many of these introductory biology classes do we need and one of the things he talked about was as a scientist he lives in a very collaborative environment. So when he is conducting a worker restraining research around genetics hes in a constant series of relationships with other genomics experts around the world. In fact the internet made that invisible college of scholars around the world much more call for full in a lot of ways that a lot of College Professors are not even in their offices. There some are else much more engaged with their peers because thats their people. The other genomics experts around the world. But when it comes time to take these classes he is not in a community of people who teach genetics 101 around the world. Hes basically by himself. So he said look what we need to do is have a class where the guy or woman who is like really great at this one piece of the curriculum is the person who has spent their life on that piece of the research they deliver that lecture. And then if somebody else for this one and somebody else for this one and somebody else for this when he said that would be a whole lot more complicated to put together and would require a lot more work and coordination. We dont take that approach to developing undergraduate classes in American Education and he said if you did not maybe you repeat that process 10 or 15 times and you have 10 or different versions as lewis said of the introductory genetics class each one is the result of the wisdom and ideas of lots of people. What you dont have is 5000 each taught by a Single Person trying to reinvent this all the time. I think thats a very different vision of how things could be organized. We have a few minutes before we go to our audience q a. Number one i want to talk about quality and kevin you say universities have no idea how to show their effect and then their effect on any proposed a system with a detailed transcript and as we go on electronically you figure out all kinds of things about the person. How do we know its going to be reasonable to say and i dont know what kind of a accreditation you have in mind a penny, how do we know that someone who has taken a melville seminar is really going to be somebody who is a highly accomplished writer and analyst . Thats number one and number two id like to see the any questions for the panelists. I dont know how we answer that question now other than the teacher in the class has a broad association with an institution that is under the umbrella of the very broad Quality Control process that doesnt even have any meaning for the upper 60 of institutions at all. The Accreditation Process we have now only practically affects the bottom tier of institutions. It is a nuisance for all the rest of them. They get to be a very expensive and annoying nuisance. Being in Tim University with any fear of not being regretted it. We have to do this and maybe we will work for us. I think and be called for this in a recent oped i wrote lewis said the federal government should say here at the 3000 classes. I dont think anyone wants total standardization of anything. I think it would be kind of great if the government could say organize a group of scholars in the field to validate a class and say this is a good enough class rather than validating institutions to actually look at the educational concept of classes which is not how our Quality Control process works. Should it determine the quality of all the classes everywhere . It should create a process that you can voluntarily associate with. Im not talking about tearing down the accreditation system. I think it has its own kind of value from an institutional selfexamination standpoint but as the only means of Quality Control that we used to attach to a massive system of government subsidy i think it is build to fail. I dont want to be naive about this but frankly folks seamless transfer which is something universities have been working on for decades which guarantees associate degree from a Community College will get you a junior status at a fouryear institution is alive and well and thats exactly what the faculty are doing when they sit down and try to determine 70 of the class is core and the 30 give or take a number that is more indigenous to that faculty member. Furthermore we do get it out a way to transfer major courses. For five credit courses to the major from a twoyear institution to a fouryear institution. In these kinds of institutions i think we have been trying to collapse the curriculum into some generalizability so that the student, remember the student has the advantage of making sure the credits they take will transfer and be meaningful to another institution. You can do that with 64 campuses you could probably do it with two or 3000 campuses and its alive and well. Allison i just want to ask allison. If you have an Engineering School the university of everywhere student that mightve gone to your school instead of of taking one from column a in two from column b and going to an organization that have all kinds of things that people havent invented yet. Right now i present you would say youre entering grads are pretty good. What would your thoughts be about the future degree under kevin spago . Its worth pointing out their are engineering students are doing flips and hybrid learning in the classrooms. We have a professor of Chemical Engineering who is but videos of on line and now she can teach only once. I like kevins model and ive often thought it having greater collaboration could allow you to save time by not reinventing the wheel. I would say thats happening a lot already. Teaching is different than it was 20 years ago. If i put together a syllabus i would be an idiot not to check with 10 different places. What i think what engineers are doing at the most handson institution. It does require ties to the community and working in labs with materials so i think where kevin has a very strong point that i would absolutely agree with asatir structures not very fluid. As nancy says when he do that better transferability and give her students options. Our engineers go abroad for a semester. Usually its hard to get in. With a builtin four program. I think we would all agree better structures are a little bit too tight but i do think its important to remember that courses are contextual. There is not one perfect course that works for students everywhere. They all offer Electrical Engineering and there will be three different goals so i worry that when you talk about finding a perfect course with the best faculty members we forget what makes a faculty member most successful is knowing the students they are teaching in pitching their class to their students. Just trying to be brief but i really feel i need to say this. You raise the question of quality assessment. How do we know if we have achieved what we are trying to achieve in an educational environmental . You mentioned melville seminar so i guess you are sort of looking at me. Forgive me but i wrote down what you said. How do we know if the student is going to emerge as a highly accomplished writer and analyst . My response to that which goes to the point i was trying to make about the humanities being frankly outside of this conversation is that thats nothing to do with what i look for as the value of the course of a teach. What i want to know is whether the student has developed a greater sense of responsibility to other human beings a greater sense of the complexity of his or her relationship to nature is more thoughtful about he or she is going to live her life and those are questions to which i cant possibly know the answer and what i tend to say to my students as you know i can give you a grade but if you really want a great comeback in 20 years and tell me how you lead your life. So thats why i think humanists tend to be grumpy and we are well aware that we represent a shrinking fraction of Higher Education but i think the skepticism that emanates from humanistic corners toward assessment measures, metrics is at least to be taken seriously in this regard. We dont want those kinds of questions to drop out of education. We dont want those business majors never to have to confront questions like that so thats my. A on that point. Just to go to the course extreme from that wonderfully melodic set of observations we have touched on cost a little bit in our conversations, nancy has but one of the questions for us all to think about deeply is whether his humanities or Something Else whether you choose to build completely nuanced courses one faculty member at a time is societys came for this on the question for us all this may be its a hysteria that theres too much debt maybe it is that maybe its not. If a society is truly reached its threshold of saying that we cant pay the choices are going to start getting made. That is i think a row question especially for folks in the academy and the institutions. Maybe its more nancy saying to keep her up night as a faculty member. The money doesnt just come from no place. At the state level for state schools they are competing with medicaid funding and k12 funding and in that order higher ed gets last. So thats less an issue for selective nonprofit schools but there is this tendency to forget that aspect of it. Where the idea of a certain number, and scored, and would it be great if we could tailor everything as kevin says. If that society through its political processes making choices about these things and absolutes are not one of the parameters of that choice to compromise. Its like what level of quality in my willing and can i afford to pay for . Well look, theres obviously a lot more to be said. I think im going to have my skip my great idea of having kevin answer questions. What i would like to do now is have the opportunity to have audience members asked questions. If you could please come to the mic which is right over there we would love to entertain your questions. And they probably have 15 minutes or so to do that. I think we have one over here. And this gentleman and the lady in the back and i think you are first in line. If you could please tell us who you are and also this is something i usually have to say in washington. I dont know its necessary in new york but these questions, not statements. Im john okeefe. My boss is sitting right there allison byerly. I work at Lafayette College in Information Technology so im interested in the technology aspect. I guess one of the things ive been thinking about as youve been talking is that theyre sort of a dimension that is the student perspective. Why is a student going to college and we talked a little bit about this in your opening remarks sort of the g. I. Bill generations of the 60s and 70s sort of thing. Now i feel like most of the students we see and that i hear from my peers are essentially going because. Because its what is next but embedded in there are different kinds of things. Some students are coming to liberal arts colleges because they want a certain kind of setting, a way of learning. Some people may be innate preprofessional scenario. So i guess what my question is, i see not the end of college but i see a world in which there are still 45 and institutions when instead of the Carnegie Classification and however many one through five whatever they are maybe there are fewer of each class but more classifications. In other words it diversity of a kind of institution fighting for fewer students because there is more of a so theres this kind of institution and that kind of institution and it becomes a much broader landscape. Theres an r1 and r to whatever that kind of classes are. Then i think these conversations then become how do you live in a world where there are more kinds of institutions but you dont want them stratified on an economic racist. In other words it still Lafayette College but you dont want to be a private finishing school for rich kids pretty want anybody who wishes to experience that kind of education to do that he so we could perhaps learn from different technologies and different approaches in a way that would help us achieve that goal within that context but its a much broader spectrum of kinds of institutions. I guess my question is, do you see any of that and how do you see the diversity of kinds of institutions affecting this landscape as opposed to theres no more Lafayette College and its all this but now there are 50 kinds of institutions with 50 different kinds of accreditation and then the challenge becomes how to navigate your institution that world so you dont in fact go under. We have heard of sweet breyer is an institution of that type. We are talking about many of the same things in many ways. And i should say i feel like liberal arts colleges which are the really cool things that came here in the United States will have to think many of the strongest claims to relevance and value in the future that i talk about because they are committed enough and small enough that they provide things that you arent going to get in a larger more diffuse and confuse institution. I dont think they are on opposite poles of technology especially the work you are doing. I talk about Davidson College in the book which isnt also an annex consortium so they dont see any conflict at all between their history of focusing on undergraduate learning. Their present is a humanities scholar. She also thinks this kind of stuff is great and is part of their future. Ultimately if we are going to have broader access to all kinds of the opportunities that we want everyone to have there only two ways to do that from an economic perspective. We can provide more public subsidies which im all in favor of and i dont in any way see a necessary connection between Technology Productivity and state disinvestment. Or we could have institutions that arent expensive to build and arent as expensive to operate. But we have unsuccessfully done yet is create an economic model that somebody creating a new organization could adopt where it could make authentic claims to provide the sort of education at Lafayette College or at Davidson College provides but isnt sorted so structurally expensive as the institutions we have now. Even a liberal arts college if you want to build one from scratch you would be talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. They give the example in the book of a Branch Campus at the university of minnesota which they built in rochester minnesota because the mayo clinic is there and they didnt have a Branch Campus. They built a two blocks away from the mayo clinic. They rented out an expensive space in an abandoned food court court. None of the classes is under 30 suthers no classsize ratio issue at all. There only two majors, health majors because they are near the mayo clinic. If you want to major in Health Sciences in the state of minnesota or elsewhere you go there. If there. If you want to major in Something Else you dont go there. Actually what was amazing about it was because they were so small and because they started from this premise the chemistry teacher in the biology teacher in anguish teacher in the philosophy teacher were all coordinating their curricula over the course of the semester so it made sense as people would go from class to class to class which is both commonsensical and entirely impossible in the kind of atomized dispersed approach to Testing Authority and educational decisions that all institutions have. This goes all the way into institutions that dont really have much of the Research System at all. So its creating space for economically and from a regulatory standpoint for people to create new institutions so the old institutions government of the more concrete sense of whats possible and what they could aspire to. So theres more competition and i think its fine to talk about competition in this context. I think only that will get us there. The next person can come up then please feel free to address the panelists if you have questions for them as well. I would like to add i am basically doing on globalization and Higher Education and many presentations on seminars. So one of the observations in a way Higher Education has done the same as projected, nobody has predicted 20 years back so the one example whether we buy it or not education has surpassed in terms of the population coming to the traditional institutes if you look at in india. Almost 3 million or more than that people are being educated in terms of Higher Education through on line and those kinds of things. Some of the institutions that resisted like harvard and m. I. T. Now they have their own type of but that being said the way you mentioned in a couple of decades and by the end of 2030 almost 3 billion people come out of poverty but the question is how many of them can afford Higher Education . That leads to my question based on the theme of your book which reminded me in the 1970s when the notion of the school is dead dead so its almost similar. So how do you treat Higher Education taking the history to believe Higher Education was private or for the public good . Do you think it has become now public good or do you think it was a public good and now it has become a private good but president obama we have to stop and have them answer questions because we have a lot of people. So on that how do you think this is a public good or private good . Sure. I believe wholeheartedly that its a public good. But i think thats a contested notion. We are very new into the idea of building human civilizations that have any aspirations to provide broad Educational Opportunity to its citizens. That is not something that is part of anybodys lengthy history. Its one of i think it is very much a cornerstone of our american selfconcept in terms of the opportunity we provide but its fragile and one can only reasonably observe where we are today and say it is in decline just in terms of how many of our public leaders talk about their priorities and the actions more important that they take in terms of supporting Higher Learning. And its complicated because i am fully aware that some of these arguments can be used for maligned purposes. I take seriously the threat that we say well its provide, lets do it on the cheap and its a private good anyway so it doesnt concern us that much if theres no subsidy built into it. I think we need to move forward towards a vision of Higher Education that is more student centered, that is more authentically effective that really will fulfill the promise of what the public sees as the public good in Higher Education which is a combination, a balance of Higher Education as a source of knowledge and enlightenment in the production of knowledge but also as a kind of Core Educational institutions. I do think that is connected to how we relate to the rest of the world. Quite frankly to be a little bit cynical i think Many American universities look at the rest of the world and say where can i find a wealthy dictatorship to bankroll might Branch Campus or who will send me full pay students to help me balance my budget this year . We need to do a lot better than that. We need to do a lot better than that. Lets get to a couple of questions and if i could ask everyone to be brief because im conscious of our timetable and we will have a reception where everyone will have a chance i hope to informally chat a bit. Please go ahead. I name is dr. Monroe. I drove three hours to be here so im very excited. Thank you for being here. I have a question. When you were talking i was thinking of my colleagues who are on the stream listening about the video classes. They Teach Technology to teachers and research to researchers and statistics. I dont see myself with a classes in my lessons but theres one thing that is missing. We can prepare beautiful classes but the mentorship i cannot see that going in a book environment environment. Howdy do do mentorship in the summer meant . Thank you very much. Good question. Dont think the university of everywhere is free. If you put the investment and you can drive the marginal cost of zero. Human relationships are not one of those things. But if we can get to a place where the things that can be low cost are low cost that will free up money to invest more money in the sorts of support and mentorship that frankly many College Students dont get in any kind of substantial way. There are some interesting organizations i talk about in the book that are trying to find ways to tackle that issue in some kind of intermediated technological ways that i think thats promising as far as that goes but again everyone live somewhere and most of us live among a lot of other people. So i think we will want to have facetoface interactions. If that is what we do that will be very different and a lot better. I think we have tried to say we are really breaking through support systems that often can be on line and they are learning a lot more about that so we are not standing still on that issue but it may not always be in person. If you were teaching 2000 people clearly its hard to be a mentor to each of them. Is there a way to outsource that so the students still feel the commitment to as the provider of that information and it is getting some level of force possible mentoring from someone . Lewis has a comment. One of the questions i would ask the audience on the panel is what happens if you combine some of the lowcost access to content that can would argue with an institution built around being a mentoring shop . So you end up with, just to be provocative i will say it come you end up with an institution is not built on the hybrid model at all that he describes. At all. And i understand. One of the things that its has been humbling for me as i move from a think Tank Community to represent a college and universities is too big discovering one of the core challenges when you are leading teaching institutions today the kind of ideas that kevin introduces are not just provocative ideas. They are peoples paychecks. They are the way you do work today. But i think when i work with the provost in the redevelopment programs i say stop for a minute and think what if you build an institution today without mentoring and you added the disciplinary content around that model . It might not even be less expensive but what with the Institution Look like that is different than what you have now . Its an exercise that helps them think very outside of simply preserving what they do. What i would like to do is have the next two questions backtoback very quick and then i will do a lightning round of fielding those questions and then we will wrap it up to bob is that going to work . We will have three and responses responses. Karo and then the dean of the university of albany. I want to take the crosssubsidy question asked by the hybrid has allowed us to build a mediocre to good undergraduate experience in a worldclass Research Enterprise and whether that transformation might lead us to have a worldclass undergraduate experience or not so Good Research enterprise . Great question. Thank you. Please. Thank you very much. Andy from columbia university. A lot of the talk and comments remind me of the idea of what do we do in the context where we are dealing with a major scale crisis in which we have done terrible things historically. Our human story what does it mean when we have Climate Change . Had to use technology to extend the range of access beyond the privileged and insular laws of universities and provide access to not only humanistic education but one that is mobilizing the power of the core curriculum to address these bigger questions like Climate Change continuous war and resource scarcity is . In your view to what extent is this vision going to be serving those . Can you create an on line elite education. Last question please. Aymara moment the present of suny and on the suny board of trustees. How do you see the university of everywhere serving and tried to think of the word i was just going to say. Underprivileged students . Thank you very much and if i could ask everybody for a really quick response. Im going to start with laurie because the on line opportunity is the democratization of access to education. Im not sure how its all going to end that we have so many students, so many young people who are not making it through even the portal of college so we cant afford to examine college outside of the lack of a coherent pipeline to college. We have millions of adults in america and of course around the world who are educated. I think we do have to find a way to translate what you are saying into fundamentally democratization. Okay. What was the first question . The idea of equity we are already seeing experiments with randomized controlled trials that show that technologies can be used to educate well folks that are less academically prepared and get them to where they need to be. Continuing along that vector will allow us to explore how that kind of innovation can help in this space. We have a separate dialog about the politics of that and how do folks that come from underresourced k12 schools, how did they get more academically prepared and that could be technology as well. Theres a question two nested questions there. One is what the technology can do what we as a society are willing to do politically to support the access to that of to that an abridged to that an abridged event so we dont have stratified systems. Thank you. I would just just say work on the crosssubsidy question. I like the way the question was articulated. Its exactly the way that i think many of us have which is if you unbundle the structure you might have more efficiency but the crosssubsidy is the reason why you can have a less expensive departments subsidizing a more expensive Chemistry Department or barge classes serving more efficiently. If you think about what makes the whole process more efficient i was relieved to hear kevin described his hope that part of what is saved by doing some things were going to mentoring or their things. My worry is if you unbundle the whole thing so theres no one institution responsible for the overall learning experience what ensures the continuation of both the abstract research that is part of our general pursuit of knowledge but even a more utilitarian way the more expensive harder to achieve but equally important areas of student endeavor that will never be efficient but have to be subsidized by someone somewhere. Okay anti. I imagine a lot of people would agree with me. Im glad the equity question is front and center. I would just observe that as many of you in the room know we live in a country now where young people in the top quartile obtain College Degrees at a rate somewhere between 2. 5 or six times depending on whose data you believe is young people in the bottom quartile. My point my comment is simply that i hope the university of everywhere will make those numbers better rather than worse worse. Maybe it wont be in terms of college completion. It will be some other terms and i worry that if we do achieve the kind of cost efficiencies that kevin and others envision they may turn out to be an excuse for reducing subsidies further than they already are. Incorporated you and kevin. Maybe you could touch on worldclass teaching. I thank and a scenario is a live one but i also believe in the end you make a strong case for public support to support institutions that are effective and efficient, saying efficient is not a good cell and it ought not to be quite frankly. The harvard red book is fascinating. It was one of the founding setback to read doing research in the senate really shows how institutions have been taking seriously this contentious question of their obligations to their undergraduates and translating that. In some ways its a document that shows how difficult it is to do even if you begin with the best of intentions to really navigate the realities of institutions as we have designed them. The question of the push and pull between Research Institutions is very important. An observation like we dont tell students that the way it is. We dont say just so you know 40 of your tuition money is going over here for this other thing. But no i dont think thats true though. I think that they take for granted the allegation that there is a seamless support and there are no hard choices there. That said it is a real danger in there certain kinds of research that have value in the market. There certain kinds of research that are strongly supported by Public Institutions whether from the Defense Department the Defense Department of the National Institutes of health. There are other kinds of scholarly work that have no value that there is not going to be the federal government provided huge amount of revenue for them. That scholarship is endangered by the future that ive layout. The book is not how to solution that problem. All i can do is recognized it and hope that we keep it in mind