By Robert Field
According to “Students shouldn’t have to suffer from rising higher education costs”:
“Pennsylvania colleges are the second least affordable in the country, according to the ‘College Affordability Diagnosis,’ a report released by the University of Pennsylvania, Vanderbilt University and the Higher Education Policy Institute…
“Students take on obscene amounts of debt, and pay it back with equally unnerving interest rates. And students are taking the dive more than ever…
“But colleges also must work to keep their costs down, alleviating the heavy burden on students.”
Universities operate today pretty much the same as they did eight hundred years ago: Students travel to campuses, live together for years, listen to lectures given in a class room, and submit assignments in person.
However we live in the age of the Internet. Time actually spent away at campuses could be cut by two thirds after the first year with two week sessions on campus per semester and the balance via the Internet. Four years could be reduced to two and half or three for those in a hurry.
Lab access could be made available locally through reciprocal agreements. Why shouldn’t the over thirty state universities and colleges share facilities? Private colleges could do the same, as is often the case already when clustered nearby.
Many courses could be better taught via the Internet, using truly distinguished teachers from whatever university they happen to be associated. Teaching assistants would be available for digital dissuasion groups.
Campuses could serve twice to three times the number of students, or appreciably reduce faculty and administrative costs.
The day of spending fifty-thousand dollars a year should be in the past except to indulge the children of the very rich. The rest can obtain as good an education by transitioning from the campus life of the later Middle Ages (which we have now) to modern conditions.
