The End of College

January 26, 2015
Education-policy advisor Carey heralds the coming annihilation of the “hybrid university,” the “deeply flawed” land-grant/research/liberal arts dinosaur responsible for “mediocre learning, high dropout rates, and skyrocketing tuition.” Carey turns his focused and attentive analysis to new education technologies that take into account real principles of learning science. With frequent excursions into personal and institutional histories, Carey describes ambitious Silicon Valley
ventures such as the Minerva Project, Dev Bootcamp, Udacity, and Coursera as catalysts that, he hopes, will burn down the archaic “cathedrals of learning” and allow the “University of Everywhere” to rise from the ashes. Carey doesn’t go into detail on how the assortment of startups and independently funded ventures will coalesce into an entity that will allow millions of students to get high-quality education, online, for free, but he does address how the creation of
a shared and dependable credential to replace the diploma poses a ticklish question. Despite his insistence that college professors are lousy teachers, Carey’s own experience with MIT’s EdX program and the innovations he describes taking place at Harvard, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon, and elsewhere suggest that some in “traditional academia” are eager to provide individual learners “exactly what they need.” Though filled with engaging profiles, insightful history, thorough detail, and grandiloquent calls for a “better, higher learning,” Carey’s picture of the real diversity of postsecondary education in the U.S.—and his vision for what should replace it—is incomplete. Agent: Gail Ross, Ross Yoon Agency.