Welcome to Science with Shrike! Today we will discuss the purpose and role of universities. More specifically, we will get at the question: “Are colleges zeros?” This will further look at the role universities play in education, and what keeps them on top in the US.
Purpose of a university
In Shrike’s opinion, the main purpose of a university is to push knowledge forward—research is its main raison d’être. Some will argue that it is a jobs program, while others may suggest a university is a business selling an experience, or a hedge fund. All of these are aspects of a university, so we will deconstruct some aspects of these arguments.
University as research
This is where it all began. People getting together to push the boundaries of what was known. Since many of these activities do not directly translate into economic activity, they needed support. Some scientists were wealthy, others supported by wealthy people who were similarly curious, but may not have had the time to pursue given subjects. Tenure evolved as a way to protect these researchers when they explored controversial ideas. This was necessary because sometimes exploring controversial ideas led to breakthroughs in thought.
The need to train the next generation combined by the desire to flex on everyone else by showing you (or your offspring) had a university education helped coursework get more established. Where else would you get (in Sir Ector’s words) an “eddication”? The purpose was learning, and showing the world that you didn’t need a job.
Today, all of the major universities are still ranked for their research, along with many other metrics. Being ranked among the top universities in the nation is a matter of how many research dollars the institution can pull in. Faculty are recruited primarily to perform research, instead of teaching. The amount of teaching may be a few lectures a year. This explains in part why some faculty are poor teachers—they weren’t hired to teach. This is also why, for better or worse, many of the new key discoveries in science still come from academia.
University as a jobs program
One counterpoint to ‘universities as research’ is the existence of elite liberal arts colleges that have minimal research activity. This builds off of the ‘colleges as a flex’… If attending the high status place is enough, you don’t need research. Also, research doesn’t directly drive exorbitantly wealth or high status… you follow a narrow list of careers and build the correct connections to ensure your success and prove your high status.
If attending university makes you high status, it becomes an easy metric for job selection. Has a college degree > does not have a college degree is a metric even the most brain-dead bureaucrat can follow. This is also easy for colleges to sell to, which drives the role of universities as jobs programs.
As a jobs program, the track record for a university is mixed. Community colleges provide lower cost (and usually lower quality) training. However, the old idea of a ‘general, liberal education’ is retained by colleges, and this idea means you have to take a bunch of irrelevant courses. While Shrike agrees with ‘general liberal education’ in theory, in practice Shrike would choose subjects like programming, math, communication, personal finance, humanity/language, science, and one more from that list, or possibly a fine art. Either way, if these are checks in the box, the Community College is an easier and cheaper route.
Job demand varies by major, further contributing to the mixed success. In the sciences, advanced training is almost always necessary. While med school and/or a PhD opens the biggest opportunities, even an undergraduate college degree is needed for most science jobs. These aren’t just checks in the box, but foundational knowledge that everyone assumes you know if you’re pursuing a science career.
University as a business
Universities in most cases, are expensive. Whether a given university is worth the money depends on the major, the person involved and the university, but top universities command tens-of-thousands in tuition per year in tuition. Why would anyone in their right mind pay that if not for a job?
Because a university is selling more than a job. It sells status and an experience. The demand for the university education is strong enough, that you can find all sorts of colleges around. If it was just jobs training, Community Colleges would have put Harvard and Yale out of business long ago. If it was just jobs, why the sports teams and commitment to athletics? Because it builds and sells the brand, both to prospective students, and to rich alumni.
For most other businesses, charging all the market can bear is considered standard operating procedure. When it comes to universities, many people seem to think the university should do it for free. Dissatisfaction with the product, and the large amounts of debt incurred for some degrees is a problem.
Overall, this sets us up for the main question:
ARE COLLEGES ZEROS?
While a provocative question, it can be reframed as: “Can the business of college be done more efficiently, thereby driving them out of business?”
Short answer is not yet.
The main barrier is status. As long as people want status, it will be incredibly challenging to displace the top universities. If you’re competing on cost, you have to out-compete the community colleges.
Another barrier is the education and curriculum.
“But people can just learn topics online/via books!”
No, most can’t. This isn’t just laziness. For a lot of subjects, people do not approach their curriculum systematically, and miss large amounts of standard information. Their learning is inefficient. Having class two or three days a week with assigned homework provides structure that most people need. This is also why online colleges failed to kill IRL college, and one reason colleges moved back to face-to-face modalities when possible after COVID..
Some people can do it on their own, for sure, and it is easier to learn certain subjects over others online. Helping people make this transition is possible, and there is a profusion of ‘how-to’ guides to do many things.
The challenge is organizing that into a curriculum, and sifting the good advice from the bad. While some may argue that the person without the PhD is more qualified to teach business or coding, that person may or may not actually be qualified. With universities, the person has been selected to teach based on some metrics of accomplishment (ie PhD, teaching/research contributions), and chosen by colleagues at the university as their choice to join them as colleagues. The rando with a website wasn’t chosen by anyone. They get clicks through marketing and the use of testimonials, which could be any degree of fabricated. In the end, it becomes brand awareness.
Some curricula being put out are legit. The BowTied Jungle has lots of actionable content, especially for SEO, ecom, sales, but also fitness, cooking, etc. The Jungle may also cover topics traditional colleges typically avoid or in new ways.
There’s also content in the Jungle that is more questionable in its utility, and as the brand increases in reach, newer, low quality content will try to leverage the brand (along with newer, high quality content coming in). So even if you find a good brand with some good curricula, how do you know which are legit and which are not? (NGMI if your thought was ‘testimonials’…social proof is just a strong sales technique). More importantly, how is your employer going to know that a particular BowTied, or other person offering the course is the real deal?
After status, the reason colleges won’t be zeros isn’t competition from ‘learning from courses’, it is credentialing. Credentialing is a huge challenge that has not yet been addressed online.
‘But I can just screen the skills I want by myself!’
Maybe.
This is more straightforward in some fields like programming, where you can assess knowledge via certain tests. But as soon as the field or objective gets remotely complex, you can’t easily test everything you need to. Weeding out LARPs is easy… but if you’re deciding between multiple competitive people, it will be challenging to decide which one has the best skills across the board, or if it is an entry role, where they are expected to develop. Where results are easy to quantify: who can throw the ball the furthest, fastest and most accurately, or who can write code to solve this problem, it’s easier to screen skills. Where results take time to find out, or are multivariate, this becomes much harder.
If only there was an easy way to figure out what knowledge someone had … Almost as if they could get something like a certificate for a few courses, or a certification for a whole field of study, …like a college degree?
So the key to driving colleges to zero is reinventing the college degree.
This is both doable, and very challenging.
The easy part comes from the fact that college degrees are divorced from practical skillsets. Even in the sciences, where most of the knowledge is foundational, there are topics that are not directly related to your future specialization. There is a lot of opportunity to realign a degree plan with practical skills.
There is also a lot of administrative bloat in the college, with jobs that could be replaced with bots, and expensive SaaS solutions that could be Open Source.
The challenge comes from the credentialing and the scaling. In the most basic form, it’s word of mouth/experience, as everyone sees the quality of one person’s course. However, this remains niche. There are also a finite number of DMs, messages and questions one person can handle. So you build out a team. Once you get beyond a core team, you will not be able to vet every single person on your team. You trust others with the brand you created. You also need to spend time on necessary things ancillary to your mission—things like IT, payments, accounting, taxes, etc
These are common logistic problems. What if there was a platform built to help creators sell their courses and share common organizational expenses? Almost like… a college? The challenge for the platform is credibility. At the platform stage, the platform can help scale, but the degree from Internet U is not going to be the same as a degree from a Community College. Bureaucrats see that the college degree box is not checked. Since bureaucrats control most of the money, your platform has to be bureaucrat-friendly. Oh, and the colleges will be quick to call your platform a scam, if they even deign to notice it.
Enter accreditation. This is how colleges are certified as not being scams. This is handled in the US indirectly by the Department of Education. Through NACIQI, the Department of Education authorizes the accreditors as trustworthy.
That means you either need to persuade an accreditor to accredit your platform, or create your own accreditation agency to certify online programs if you want to play at the federal level in the US.
If you are niche, you may be able to work directly just with an accreditor that deals with one specialty or program (think American Bar Association). If not, you need an accreditor that handles larger colleges, or perhaps platforms. In the US, these are largely regional (eg Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities handles accreditation for ~160 colleges/universities in WA, OR, ID, MT, AK, UT, NV).
If you want to be accredited, you need miles and miles of documentation. You need to prove that you are being fair to students and faculty. You need to prove that you have fair ways of handling disputes. You need to have a plan for a wide range of scenarios …and you get to repeat all of the accreditation fun every 5 years. Now you start to understand where some of that bloat in colleges comes from.
Since this is not fun work to do, accreditation will lag until it is needed. That means a platform has to reach a large enough scale, and wants to adopt to mainstream. If you’ve already solved the accreditation problem, there should be a strong demand from platforms eager for your accreditation. If your platform solves it first, you will build some moat due to the challenge of getting everything accredited. Of course, someone might fork your admin policies… but let’s be honest… if you’re going the accreditation route, you probably forked a university’s policies and then adjusted it. Of course, they have a lot of policies not present and/or derivative from the ones posted online.
Are there other reasons you see why colleges will continue to survive and thrive?
I don't see colleges surviving. As you pointed out, too much bloat. Clinical medicine for example... All you really need is 2-3 years, clinical physiology, neuroanatomy, clinical pathophysiology, imed, OBGYN, paeds in that order. All of the above can be learnt online by channels such as Geeky Medics, ninjaNerds etc which are way better and more indepth than sitting in a lecture hall listening to someone yap about shit within a given time. After that you can move on to practical training on dummies etc mixed with real life hospital observations. All of that can be done in 3 years and maybe allow an extra year to complete for those who are slow The best thing about learning online for something as complex as medicine is you can pause, rewind and repeat in real time, it's 10x more efficient.
Then all the bloat with bullshit subjects like epidemiology, immunology, biostats, pharmacology etc are irrelevant to clinical medicine. Nobody remembers that shit. Take COVID as an example. Did epidemiology come handy for any doctor on the field? Nope, what came in handy was intubation skills and getting IV access to obese patients.
Then the biggest scam of all is Family medicine. After world war 2, America was left with more specialists than GPs. So rather than incentivize being a GP, they made a speciality called "Family Medicine". Which is basically another 4 years of learning what you already know.
And here's the kicker....countries that recognises GPs also adopted Family Medicine as a speciality. What a clown world. 🤡
And this is using clinical medicine as an example, a degree that most people against college degrees claim is probably the only degree not a scam.
As for accreditation centres. I won't even get into how ECFMG/EPIC, Royal Fellowship of (insert speciality here) are scams.
In my humble opinion. All theoretical work should be handled online and up to the student to choose whatever resources they want to learn from.
Followed by an exam that leads to a practical in person component.
The prerequisite knowledge for that exam should be in detail and given to the student before embarking on their online learning adventure. The exam should test understanding of complex concepts rather than testing on ability to recall. There's no need to have a good ability to recall these days when you can whip out Medscape on your phone.
This will initially lead to mass failures (majority can't grasp complex concepts so easily), which will lead to online communities centred around explaining those concepts, leading to better online content, leading to better graduates.
All it takes is just one country to do this and others will be forced to follow or get left behind.