a discussion with college officials where he argues the cost of college combined with advancements in technology will lead to a fundamental transformation of our higher education system in the near future. .. >> to a education analyst in washington, d.c. who have quickly joined the top tier of education writes around the nation. kevin has written for the washington monthly, the new republic, the chronicle of

higher 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 he directing -- directs the education policy program there. and, of course he's the author of "end of college," which we'll be talking about today. but i thought i'd also tell you a few things you might not know about kevin, because he contains multitudes. as a blogger, he has established a reputation over the years for finding excuse -- and i really mean any excuse -- to write about the education policy implications of shows like "the wire" and "friday night lights." and when you read his book, you'll find references to downton abbey, to game of thrones, and there's probably others that i missed. i'm going to be very disappointed in his talk today if kevin doesn't at least mention "better call saul" or the serial. [laughter] he's a musician officionado a student of the perhaps tease

and although she's -- trapeze and i would urge you do not make the mistake, as i did, of referring to the tram peez as trampolining. kevin also takes on some unexpected topics. he wrote a really fibroand memorable essay -- fine and memorable essay a while back about how learning computer programming made him a better writer. and although kevin certainly sees himself as a man of the left, when policy preferences align, he is definitely not afraid to make common cause with the right. he once wrote a long i new remix piece praising the higher ed program of then-governor rick perry of texas. and the headline was "rick perry is a higher education visionary seriously." now, there are some people in higher education who consider kevin a provocateur, and maybe that's right. provoking a system that's badly in need of self-examination is a

big part i think, of what kevin sets out to do. he cares a lot about equity and opportunity. and he certainly doesn't mince words. in "the end of college," we read about the, quote: systematic tragedy of a grossly expensive postsecondary system that is quote, shamelessly -- shamefully indifferent to undergraduated learning. undergraduate learning. kevin isn't just critical of universities, to be father. in his final chapter he advises students. he says, quote: put down the bong and get to work. now, kevin's always worth listening to, he's always worth debating. and we're going to have both today with a short talk by kevin, some reactions and conversation from a great panel and, finally some awed a yens questions. after that -- audience questions. after that we'll go to a reception outside where there will be books available for sale and signing. please join me in welcoming my friend and colleague, kevin

carey. ms. . >> thank you ben, for the wonderful introduction. i am a proud graduate of binghamton university, so you can either feel pride or regret in that depending on what you think of my book and the conversation we have today. it was robert maynard hutchins the very well known president of the united university of chicago, who wrote in his 1930s book "the idea of the university," still a very modern approach to thinking about higher education and the book begins along the lines of the most important thing to understand about the university is the confusion that besets it. and in many ways, the first part of my book -- which is a history

of american higher education -- is the story of that confusion. where it came from and what it continues to still mean today. and i think i don't believe anything that it says, that the book says about the history of american higher education is really all that contested or controversial. i claim no original scholarship. many of the ideas have been represented in books of higher education history that have been used for a long time. the book talks quite a bit about how in the formational period of american higher education in the late 19th century we decided or allowed to happen an organizational model that stuck together three essential purposes; the research university which came from germany, the mission of practical training represented in policies like the moral land grant act, and the broader ideals of liberal education. not my framework, you can go

back to the seminal history of american higher education, the emergence of the american university which was published 50 years ago. actually, still a wonderful book and still in print, to read about how that happened. and to me, the amazing the interesting thing is almost as soon as that happened, people inside the i academy kind of looked at the system and said well that doesn't really make a whole lot of sense to try to put together a research university and a liberal arts college in an organize that's meant -- an organization that's meant to train people for practical fields, for the labor market all in one place. william james the famous prague mat u.s. philosopher wrote ans essay called the ph.d. octopus where he made the offense vegas that the things you had to do for a ph.d. had nothing to do with whether or not you were going to be good in the

classroom. he said it was a sham, a bobble a dodge -- which i picked as the second chapter of the my book -- meant to throw dust in the eyes of the public, to to fool people into thinking the university was something other than it was. probably one of the most famous college professors in american history taught at columbia in the 1930s and '40s and had a career that went all the way to the end of the century. there's a chapter called the ph.d. octopus, his continued heated agreement with what williams james had said 30 years prior, made all the same points. but by that point it was much, much too late really for the university organizational model to change. there's sort of a well known phenomenon where once organizations become a certain way, they become more like one another over time. this is just kind of basic organizational theory. so the question that interested me was why it has persisted for

so long. these kinds of things happen all the time. organizations form in certain ways. they get used to the way they are, and eventually someone comes along with some new way of doing things and the world changes. and yet virtually everything that hutchins said about the university in 1934 you could say about universities now, 80 years later. why is that? 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, than kind of an epic string of good luck that in some ways i don't think we can expect to continue. it was, of course a great virtue that the american university model was made in america and not, say in europe where many of the great higher education institutions were decimated during the catastrophe of the beginning of the 20th century. our universities were in the ascendant industrial power of the age in a tremendously

wealthy, growing nation a nation of immigrants where people were looking for means to uplift their children and saw colleges and universities as the way that you would do that. the first nation in the world to decide that it would be a good idea to try to get everybody through high school. a nation with a congress that in a sort of basic attempt to try to find something to do with returning veterans when they came back from world war ii, why don't we send them to college and see how that works out? a nation that decided to fight the cold war by providing billions upon billions of dollars to research universities in order to conduct the research necessary to compete with the soviet union. so my argument is that that wave of money and enrollments and good fortune overwhelmed whatever internal contradictions might have been there all along and that we're really only now in a time where in some ways those historical moments of good luck have receded. and i'll add one more.

the economy changed around us. so you get to the point in the history of american higher education in the '60s and '70s, there was a lot of social dissatisfaction with the institution, some real doubts inside the academy about whether the institution would continue. there was a very famous book published in the early 1970s called "the overeducated american" where a harvard economist predicted we were producing too many college graduates, and we would -- we were about to enter a period in which their wages would decline. well, of course, exactly the opposite thing happened after that, because we were then in the midst of deindustrialization and globalization. and the transition from a society where de-unionization, a transition from a society where you could earn a middle income with just a high school diploma to the world we live in now where you certainly can't. and the only way you can have a fighting chance in the american economy is to have some kind of postsecondary credential, and the only organizations that are allowed to issue those credentials are the only organizations that are allowed

to access public subsidies, are colleges and universities as we've known them for a long time. so i feel that the flaws have been there for a long time but the consequences and the stakes are much higher now than they've ever been before. and those same internal contradictions that really weighted the anticipations and the -- attentions and the culture of the university against undergraduate learning which is borne out in most of the research that we have around how much students learn in college -- i think a lot of us are familiar with very interesting work of sociology academically adrift came out a few years ago. the newest members from the oecd that compare the just sort of foundational math and reading skills of the average american college graduate to the average college graduate in other countries including, i should say, other countries that graduate more people from college than us, not less and finds the average american college graduate doesn't look very good compared to his or her

peers in other countries. all that, i would argue, is at root a function of that confusion and a confusion that causes institutions to not take their essential mission to provide rigor and coherence and attention to their undergraduator educational mission as seriously as they ought to. so this is the point in the book where information technology kind of intersects with these long-term trends. and rest of it really is talking about how things have changed in information technology how there are all kinds of things that are possible now that were not possible even a few years ago. you know, i acknowledge that by talking about this i join a long and kind of ignoble roster of people who have predicted that every new kind of information technology would surely overthrow the college as we know it. thomas edison said that high schools would become obsolete because we would just show students movies a long time ago, and he turned out not to be

right about that. but i believe fundamentally that this time is different. i think the kinds of information -- the information technology environment we're many now is very, very different than when the best we could do was have college on the radio or college over cable television, that the nature of interactivity, that the computational power, that the9mr ability to create authentic human communities in a combination of a virtual space and a real space is much 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 that students experience now and i'll sort of pause for a moment 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 of our institutions.

i would argue that there is a large distance between the two of them. so if we're going to think about what's possible in the future we can't say well, this that or the other vision of technology-enabled education could never be good as few memory of my one great class that i had in college. because we tend to remember the one great class we had many college, and we tend to not remember the very many unmemorable education experiences that we had. and often really it was much more of the latter than the former. and then the other thing that we need to think about is just the basic issue of how not only can we do better educationally in some cases, we can do the same for many more people for a lot less money. and that's important. we cannot ignore the economics of high or education in all of this -- higher education in all of this. as part of the book, i took a mook, a word i think everyone became instantly tired of hearing a few years ago something that went through the

classic kind of cycle of overpraise and then disappointment but which, nonetheless, i believe represents a very, very important and ongoing development in american higher education. so mostly as kind of a narrative device, if you read the book -- and i hope you will. i took an entire mit genetics class through the ed-ex platform. i don't represent my learning experience as representing any other than myself. learners are different in many many, many different ways. what i think is noteworthy about the fact that i took this mit genetics class is the one thing i'm sure of is that my experience was in no important way different than the experience of the students who were taking the same class in cambridge, massachusetts. it's a very kind of straightforward approach to pedagogy that they use for these introductory classes at mit which is, of course, one of many approaches but not exactly uncommon one. it was a lecture-based class a

very good welcometure 6 -- good lecture-based class. good lectures can be really good. true nonetheless. this was a lecture that was taught by a man named eric lander who helped lead the human genome project in the 1990s. he's been teaching introductory biology which is introduction to genetics class for going on 20 years. he's as updated in the field as possible to be changes the class every year because genetics changes every year. so 100 students real freshman at mit took this class. they taped all the lectures and then about two weeks later, tens of thousands of people around the world -- including myself -- watched the same lectures did exactly the same problem sets, did exactly the same homework assignments, took the same exams. i actually went up the cambridge to see the class in person. i was kind of curious is there

something i'm missing by not being there? i interviewed a bunch of the students afterwards to get a sense how they took the class. i interviewed eric lander and some of the teaching assistants. i really wanted to be sure i was right about this and what they all told me was the same thing. they said look this class i went to the lectures. i went back, i talked to some of my fellow students -- which i could easily do in on line forums they had at edex set up -- i worked very hard on the sets, and i took the exams. that's how they teach that class at mit. and you can replicate that, essentially, perfectly at a marginal cost to the last student or nothing. probably costs them a couple hundred thousand dollars to produce the class quote-unquote. they put it out there and now anyone can take it for free. the combination, i think, of the fact that we can reach so many

more people for so much less money and in certain elements but certain important elements of higher education the fact that the reach of information technology continues to expand the fact that we can predict confidently that these smart people in places like stanford and carnegie mellon who have been trying very hard to put together neuroscience and cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence into really serious attempts to make the experience of learning in a technology-enabled environment much, much more than what i did which was just watch lecture videos and solve problems. we can predict with confidence that certain kinds of trends are going to continue in certain kind of directions. more people will have access to better technology. our use of technology educationally is going to continue to improve. the genie is out of the bottle in terms of the best, quote-unquote or most prestigious is probably more accurate american colleges and

universities putting their good name behind these kinds of educational experiences. and when you put that together, that's what -- you put all those things together, and that's what produces what i characterize in the book as the university of everywhere. here's what i mean by that specifically. i have a daughter, he's four and a half, she's about to turn five. and the question that sort of animated me when i wrote the book was what will college be like when she turns 18? will it be pretty much just the same it was when i turned 18, or will it be something substantially different? and i, in the end, came down on the substantially different side of things. if she was turning 18 today, she would have with basically two options. she could go to a traditional college or university, or she could engage in some kind of mostly purely online version of that that wouldn't with as good -- wouldn't be as good. so she would go to the traditional one, and i would spend whatever amount of money my wife and i could put together and, if we were typical, borrow

a bunch more money, and she would go. fifteen years from now when she goes to college here's what i think will be different. i think she will still have the option of going to traditional institutions, many of which will frankly, still be trying to charge even more money and compete viciously with one another for the very last full-pay student out there wherever he or she is. out of state, overseas. somewhere, there's got to be a person who will write a check for the full amount of money. there will be -- i don't even want to say online because i think our sense of what online means is going to change quite a lot. we definitely -- you can't assume that the future that the nature of interacting with technology 20 years from now is going to be, like, this thing that we do now, the way that we interact as humans with machines will evolve over time in ways that will be more human, not less as we go forward. and then i think we now have the opportunity to create -- and this is the thing i'm in many

ways most excited about -- new higher learning organizations that provide all of the hugely important yet not quite as specific intangible benefits of belonging to an authentic human learning community. i think people when they turn 18 will the still want to leave the home and go somewhere have what i had as a sunni student. live among other people my age having coming of age experiences, go out on weekends learn some things, fall many love. all this. people will still want to do all of 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 will be both more effective and a lot less expensive. you're not going to have to pay

the increasingly high toll for admission to these walled gardens of learning that we've erected over the last couple of centuries to get a quote college education. in many ways, the traditional model is fundamentally a product of scarcity. if you wanted to get a good college education, you needed access to three things. you needed to be where the other students were, you needed to be where a critical mass of scholars and mentors and teachers were and you needed to be someplace that could afford to take advantage of the best information technology of the time which was the printed book. and all those things cost a lot of money. it costs a lot of money to build a place where you could have enough students and people. it costs a lot of money to buy all the books worth reading. and i think because that had to be scarce we've all kind of on some level willingly or unwillingly internalized this idea of scarcity in the higher education and thus this notion

that we should judge colleges by how many people they don't let in. we are right now in the middle of making a very profound transformation from a time of scarcity to a time of abundance in education resources and i really do think that will change fundamentally the kinds of educational organizations that are possible and that will become over this time. not just here in the united states, but around the world. probably the most, single most important thing that's happened on planet earth over the last 40 years has been the decline in global poverty. in 1980 52% i believe, of all the people on earth were below the poverty line of $1.25 a day. that number is now down around 20% even as the population of the earth grew to seven billion people. so middle ground estimate is between now and 2030 three billion people will join the global middle class. that's more people than have ever been to college in all of

human history. and the first thing that you want for your children once you can provide safety and health care and food and shelter is education. we cannot educate those three billion people by building millions of american-style colleges and universities. we can barely afford to do that here in the richest nation on earth. so so it's not just -- isn't just going to happen. the university of everywhere isn't going to be just in our own society. i think in many ways it will be these fantastically growing and dynamic developing societies that won't even ask themselves some of these questions about what do we do with the older institutions and how do we change them. they will move right to the new as fast as they can. and be that is going to be a reality that we can take advantage of, but that we also need to be aware of, because they're not going to wait for us to resolve the arguments that we've been having around our higher learning systems for a long time. so i'm very optimistic. i think it's 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. but we're going to have to look outward, not inward we're going to have to have a much broader sense of possibility about what a college or a university can be and ought to be and is obliged to be given the world that we live in. and i think that it can happen and it can emanate from our public institutions. i fundamentally believe that in the public purpose and public good of higher education, but we need more institutions, and we need better institutions, and we need institutions that are much less cob fused than -- confused than they have been. so i really appreciate you taking the time to listen, and i'm looking forward to talking with my fellow panelists. [applause] >> thank you very much, thank you very much, kevin. that was a great start, and i'd now like to call up our panelists.

[inaudible conversations] >> well i guess i'll start from up here. as you can see, kevin has been joined by four panelists. we're very fortunate to have them. each comes from quite a different background and works at a very different kind of institution which i thought would be a useful way to get some different responses to what kevin has to say today and in his book. let me start by introducing allison byerly to my immediate left. allison has been president of lafayette college in eastern pennsylvania for just about two years. she was previously provost at

middlebury college and as a faculty member, she has had interdisciplinary appointments. she's a literary scholar by background. she's been a visiting scholar at mit, at stanford at oxford. she is a leading voice nationally about on issues of the emerging forms of digital scholarship as well as the changing role of the humanities in the digital age which i hope we'll touch on this afternoon as well as mooks, of course inevitably. she's written for the chronicle of education, for inside higher ed and other publications. she has a ph.d. from the university of pennsylvania and her most recent book is are we there yet: virtual travel in victorians realism. to allison's left is andy delbanco who is a professor at columbia where she's been since 19 -- he's been since 1985. he is an expert on melville

he's an award-winning teacher, and his most recent book is called "college: what it was is and should be," which came out a couple of -- three years ago which i had the pleasure of reading and reviewing, and the it's really well worth your time. he writes regularly for the new york review of books and other places, and he writes on american literary topics he writes on religious history many different areas. in 2011 he was awarded a national humanities medal by president obama. now to my immediate right is louis soares. louis is vice president for policy research and strategy as well as head of the center for policy analysis at the american council on education. in washington d.c. he's had more than 20 years of experience in postsecondary education including and i think significantly for our discussion today, a lot of experience in adult and work force related

education. before being at a.c.e., he was director of the postsecond daughter program at center for -- postsecondary program at center for progress and before that he was director of business development in rhode island and was also director of education and training for the rhode island technology council. he was appointed by arne duncan secretary of education in 2011 to serve on the board of fipse the fund for the improvement of postsecondary education. and last and definitely not least, she's my boss, nancy zimpher, the chancellor of the state's largest system of higher education with nearly a half million students. that would compare with, i think, allison, about 2500 students at lafayette? i want to say 5, 6,000 undergraduates at columbia? >> a little more. >> yeah, yeah. so very large system.

and since nancy became chancellor she's been a very vocal advocate for legislative reforms to try to see that sunni continues broad access at a time when, of course we all know there's been declining state support. she's also been very entered in highlighting suyn's role in catalyzing economic development in the state. she's active in many state and local and national organizations, some of the areas that particularly interest her are teacher preparation, which is something suny is working on right now with a new commission. she's also interested in urban education, she's interested in university/community engagement and much more. before nancy came to suny, she was the president of university of cincinnati, she was chancellor at the university of wisconsin in milwaukee, and she was the executive dean of the professional college and also dean of the college of education at ohio state.

so all that said, what i've asked the panelists to do -- and i'm going to sit down and join them -- is just take a few minutes to give their broad to what kevin has told us. and i think -- [inaudible] and after you each give your quick reactions, i'll ask kevin to give his quick reaction -- [inaudible] there you have it. >> okay. is this machine working? so hi. thanks for coming and thank you kevin, for the book and the excellent introductory remarks. i often feel that i'm invited to this kind of conversation to be the sort of curmudgeonly dissenter. [laughter] so there you go, how about that? i was right about that. so i'm going to try not to be that although i probably inevitably will slide into it. let me -- can we've been

admonished to take five minutes, which i'm going to try to stick close to and i'm going to try to make five points in five minutes. but, 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 the scandalous neglect, a laziness about reconceiving them, that we should be careful about this distance between our nostalgic ideal memories of our best college experience and the sorry reality that's often the case out there and that we need to experiment. and i also think, kevin makes a good case for why previous technologies in which people invested a lot of hope -- radio, television most recently the mooks although i guess the returns aren't quite in with them yet -- have not delivered on the promise. so the first point which isn't really exactly a point just a

comment. i think we ought to acknowledge that kevin's book as provocative and smart as it is, belongs to a genre that includes it as well as other books like college unbound, a book from some years ago called do-it-yourself university or diyu and the very scholarly william bowen gave some lectures on higher education in the digital age in which some of these questions have come up. and i don't mean this disrespectfully, but as a literary person i think this these kinds of term my sense is actually that the genre to which kevin's book most sensibly belongs is science fiction. [laughter] and science fiction is great. sometimes the predictions turn out to be right. jules byrne predicted space travel bellamy predicted radio. a lot of what may be in kevin's

book could be right but i don't think we know that. the vision is a very optimistic one. we want to be hopeful. now, second, this is maybe a slightly more substantial point. kevin suggests, if i read the book rightly that we have learned a great deal in the last 20 years or so about how the human mind learns things, that cognitive science has made great deal of progress. and i'm on thin ice here because i'm certainly no cognitive scientist, but when i read in the book that education is a quote, education is a deliberate process of rewiring your brain, i am reminded -- and you invoke william james in your opening remark -- there's a chapter on habit in the book "principles of psychology" which is about 125 years old in which he essentially says the same thing. only his metaphor is sort of a water metaphor. water and pipes rather than signals going through wires he

says learning is about removing obstructions little by little until they are swept out of the way, and we have created through repetitive usage a natural channel of understanding. i also think socrates knew something about how the mind works, which is why he preferred the format of asking questions to making statements, because he understood that people only learn things when they engage actively with questions. so i'm not challenge anything that kevin says about how we learn, but i'm a little skeptical about whether we know more about it than we once did. the third point and here the ice is even thinner because i'm certainly no economist i'm not persuaded that we really know these new technologies will bring cost savings. they might. there are good arguments that they will. but at the same time, the if we're going to do -- if we're

going to do the things kevin wants us to do, we need to reinvent, maintain and renew these institutions continually which we try to do now by training new generations of teachers which are, which is a very expensive process and not a very very effective one. the premise of the promise here is that digital technology will allow us to do this better and more cheaply. i'm not convinced. so far it looks to me like we're going to need a lot of well compensated, highly trained people to update these technologies all the time. the fourth point is a blunt one. i have no idea how the vision in kevin's book or, indeed, any number of books that are moving in a similar direction, connect to what i do, to humanistic education. which is not the same thing as liberal education because liberal education certainly has to include science and technology. but humanistic education has at

its core debate about values and interpretations. and it may very well be a failure of my imagination, but i cannot grasp how a machine -- until we get to the point where a machine is indistinguishable from a human being which we may get to at some point -- can conduct the kind of education that i get paid such as it is, to do. [laughter] and finally again, this is not meant to be any kind of skepticism about kevin's sincerity or commitment to the idea there's a great democratizing power and that we have been scandalously neglectful in bringing educational opportunity to everyone in our society not to mention the globe but i worry we may be embarking on a road that will lead to greater

stratification rather than less stratification, that we may be heading to a world where the wealthy, the affluent will continue to go to the institutions i suspect -- please don't take this amaze that you're four-and-a-half-year-old daughter will apry not only to a -- apply not only to a traditional college but early decision -- [laughter] and kids with fewer resources and fewer opportunities will be on line, though i take the point online may mean something very different from what it means now. so thanks. >> okay. thanks andy. let's turn it over to allison. >> i'm myself very interested this technology and the possibilities that technology offers, and so there's a lot in kevin's book that i really appreciate in the way that it challenges us as educators to think creatively about the ways in which technology inevitably are changing and will change the kind of education that we offer. i think there's a lot that's very exciting about the

possibilities that are in front of us, and i think if there's one thing that is most useful about this debate, about the role of mooks, about the role of technology about the ways in which the structure of education needs to change is that it's focusing changes that we haven't seen in decades. the fact that there are regular editorials about teaching, what it should be, how it could get better, that's all exciting and, i think, presents a lot of opportunities for those of us in education. at the same time, it won't surprise you if andy's the curmudgeon i'm the liberalized column president so it won't surprise you to say i actually think colleges work pretty well and will stick around for a while. i'd like to just maybe focus on three points and kevin's argument that i think are worth further debate and i hope we'll have more time to spend on. first is the premise that technology is not only going to be better, but it's going to be less expensive and it's going to solve the problems that we all wrestle with in trying to make college accessible and

affordable. college presidents at schools like mine typically focus on trying to keep costs down, trying to offer what we have as broadly as possible and, frankly, raising as much money as we can so as to offer financial aid to make college available to those who have a hard time paying the tuition that we offer. there are lots of things we could do better, lots of ways to work on it, but we're a nonprofit organization that is not making any money on what we're offering and we still have a hard time offering it at an affordable level. you can imagine what happens when for-profit entityies enter the marketplace. that's why they're moving very quickly into job training rather than kind of classic higher education. because, in fact that's a lot more money-making. it's actually really hard, in fact impossible to make money offering quality education of a kind we all would like our children to expoorps. and that's why we rely so heavily on the philanthropy who have recognized the value of the education they themselves have received and offer that back.

you do most of your paying after you've gotten the product of the -- the value of the product you purchased. it makes it possible to offer scholarships. i don't see anything like that in technology currently. the mooks that are being offered typically cost thousands of dollar to develop and it's hard to maintain that to say we'll do that for free. i guess i'll be surprised if 20 years from now there's enough money even at harvard to offer everything they have for free without charging anyone. and the idea that it could be endlessly available is an attractive one, but i think that's a little bit optimistic. speaking as someone who spends a lot of time with budgets the kids paying tuition at harvard are not going to subsidize courses for the rest of the world forever. so i think that the economic premise behind that is a little bit problematic. i think as someone who has spent decades working with students

the picture that kevin paints of himself and by expense other students as a kind of educational entrepreneur who can go out and find the things that they want and sort of knit them together into an experience that is the unbundled combination of lots of things they found separately, again, is a wonderful idea not typical of most of the 17 18, 19 and 20-year-olds that i or anyone else deals with. they come to college specifically wanting and needing advice. cure ration of the information that's out there. students come to us not for information per se but for our capacity to help them make sense of it, to sort it into a curriculum that they follow in some kind of systematic way and to offer them advice guy dance and -- guidance and support throughout the process. it is, i would maintain, different from inviting them to sit at their computer and go out and find the world. i think there are many students who do wonderfully that way. i think mit can tell you wonderful success stories of

kids who have taken mooks and been successful, that's 1 or 2% of the students who are out there. the rest who are in our classes are the ones who need a certain amount of help and guidance, and really that's what they come to us for. and finally, i guess the third thing that i take issue with is the premise that place doesn't matter, that where you are as a location and as a community isn't fundamentally part of the educational experience. for those of us who work at rez ken cial colleges the -- residential college, the kinds of thing that go on 24/7 outside the class room are things we think of as fundamental to the student's growth as individuals. what we do in the class room we like to think of as closely connected to the kind of leadership experiences they have through activities and athletics, through the kind of social development that comes from living together. and i'll say that as someone who taxes often to 'em -- talks often to employers. they're looking for teamwork capacity to understand and work with people from diverse cultureses, they're looking for social skills and communication

skills. i think many people would say that the use of technology among5g today's students don't necessarily improve their communication social skills. i think living in commitments and getting to live, work with and study alongside people who are different from themselves is one of the most important benefits we offer as part of a community. so i would say that while i hope and expect that institutions like my own would learn from technology, offer more and more opportunities to fold technology into our classes as we already are, i'm not sure i see it as an either/or model where technology wins and college loses and they're two entirely separate and distinct experiences. i hope we will see a kind of hybrid model in the future where we will adopt the best of technology, but it will be part of a continuing learning community that is deeply rooted in the experience of living and learning together. >> so both and, not either/or. >> yes. >> o.k.. >> okay. so one of the things i appreciated in the book kevin,

other than the table of contents which has great titles for chapterses like thunder lizards is one of the chapters written about today's institutions, but it was that i thought you really well laid out it's this overlaying of technology socialization, a way we've come to think about what college is. i think one of the things in the book that the history of college serves is that it unpacks for us when colleges got standarded in western europe they -- got started in western europe i they look quite different. so there's been a revolution, and i would pause at whether we believe in your future or not, the continued evolution may lead to something that looks quite as different from what we look like today as today looks like from what we started -- [inaudible] i think that's something for us all to keep in mind. i've worn a variety of hats over my career. i'm a policy researcher and thinker.

i've worked at state level and i thought i wanted to take on some of those different dimensions in reading kevin's book. i think one of the rich things about kevin's exploration of learning and technology in the book really talked about its relational quality that technology and our interaction with it tends to begin with actually how people learn and how it can improve the way people learn. and i don't think kevin provides his natural conclusion for where that's going to lead, but i think it's a deep question for us all to think about. that i'm aware of randomized controlled trials that show that students learning with these enriched environments are doing better than students even in selective institutions, having better learning outcomes. that doesn't mean it's dispositive and that's what's going to happen, but i think the question itself is one we need to appreciate in a way that whether it leads to a hybrid approach or not that we should

take seriously that it can actually deepen the relational quality of learning not turn it into some online thing. i think cognitive science supports that until now, and i think we should take seriously that question. related no -- related to this i think this question of learner agency, when is it exactly that someone has enough sort of metacognitive skills along with a deep enough pool in a certain discipline they're studying that they have some agency, i don't think we study that often enough. and i think it's a very relevant question. whether kevin's world is true or not. and i think the academy needs to take that deeply. so that's just the cognitive science/technology part. on the policy side, but also student demographic side it's based on ncs data, only 20% of all students live on campus -- go to school pull time and live

on residential campuses. 73% of all students conot fit that pro-- do not fit that profile. i think the average age is 26 or 27 now. so the idea posited that young people at 18 are the people we're serving, looking for that kind of experience is no longer the lived reality of many, many institutions. and i think that that's that demographic shift is as much an issue in feeding into kevin's, the world that kevin posits for us. you know, we focus very off when we think of innovation on the technology part of innovation. destruct canner when he was -- drucker, when he was exploring innovation himself he believes one of the true drivers of change was dem ogg by. demography. and i think we are seeing that is here, and the way those folks need to learn because they

balance a variety of things -- work, life and education -- how they balance that and the way that university of everywhere allows them to balance that really will push demand for that be we're at that tipping point. -- if we're at that tipping point. you know from a state policy perspective, you know, more broadly from a policy perspective first, you know, at least since the higher ed act since the g.i. bill we've been also forming what we think college is by the way we choose to fund college. program integrity rules, the credit hour. i'm not positing whether those are ready to change but that's realize that it's a constant construct that we created. so policy and we as polity can choose to also change that, and society may. and finally, just by way of an example, so where i currently work we represent a membership organization. nancy's on our board.

suny. so many colleges and universities are members. and one of the fascinating things for me having come on a journey from a think tank community, more reform-oriented societal change, has been to watch incumbent institutions -- so institutions that are doing the hard work of educating students now -- wrestle with that change. and to link it to policy. there was a recent regulatory change in the last few years at the federal level that allowed it enhanced department of education's ability to allow institutions to experiment with different pedagogical models. it's called experimental sites. and it's been fascinating to watch the dialogue. most of the institutions that have opted to try new pedagogical models would not be well branded or prestigious institutions. pleasure and much of the skepticism of the attempt to try comes from prestigious institutions. if one could say they're winning the current, current lottery for

students in all those things. and it's been fascinating for me to watch that happen, pause that's not a pressure -- because that's not a pressure being applied from outside the academy. the academy's struggling with itself for what is new pedagogy look like. and that was framed by a policy change. and i think that these questions are in play. we don't have to believe kevin's view of the future to look at some of the facts that he posits for us and not believe that there's a change afoot and, in fact the academy's struggling with itself to figure out what it means and what it's gonna look hike in the future. >> -- look like in the future. >> thank you, louis. nancy? >> welcome, everybody, we're thrilled to have you at the suny center, and i can assure you that chairman mccaul and i don't want to lose our job -- [laughter] so we hope it isn't the end of college. i not only thing kevin is on to something, he got me to stop my

engine and read the book. even though i finished at 11:00 last night, it was provocative for me. i love the history of higher education, and i've begun to think that we are the second iteration of clark kerr's vision of a system. because as it turns out, california is three separate systems that were intended to articulate but, in fact, find that very challenging. and, of course, one of uniquenesses of the state university of new york is that we have embedded in one system the easy relationship between community colleges -- a president in our audience -- all the way to medical schools. and it's a fascinating opportunity. and in many ways an experiment. so i like that. secondarily, i think the middle section of the book was a lot about examples, and you may recall that suny was a participant in this experiment to teach statistics on lewin --

online using carnegie mellon's learning initiatives. we did no harm. turns out the online students did pretty well and we learned a ton about teaching and learning this that process. and i'll come back to that -- in that process. aactually think -- i actually think, i love books that give you a massive wake-up call, and i think you did that for us. on the flip side, i think it was a relatively rarefied view of higher education. i belong to an organization called the national association system head. it's 44 systems across 34 states that have the statutory authority to hire presidents to assess and evaluate the work that these systems are doing and we educate 75% of the undergraduate population in this country. so i have to translate what you're trying to tell us into

what we're trying to do. which is to educate more people and educate them better. and we have done something at suny to blur the lines between the segments of education. so we're very rivetted on completion. i do believe the degree will still have currency for a long time to come, and i think you're being told by some of the respondents to the book that credentialing and credit opportunities are really what's going to turn the corner here, that people are still going to want to exhibit what they've learned in some fashion. and i couldn't agree with you more that the transcript simply does not tell the story. and that we've lost a lot of information about what our learning opportunities have provided us. but on this journey to educate more people and to which i think the digital age can make a huge

contribution, we have real opportunity lu digital -- through digital learning to connect finally the k-12 system with the higher education system. students now are taking 30-60 credit hours in high school. so the first thing about your daughter is she'll probably only be in high school for a couple of years and will be starting college much earlier. i do think that delivery systems through dingingal mechanisms -- digital mechanisms will help us better connect high school to college. it is also still the case that so many of our students come to college totally unprepared to do college work. will the common core or higher standards solve this? we know not yet. but i can imagine that our delivery system would be immensely enhanced if we could enable a faster pace through developmental education to college-level courses using digital delivery systems. once we get students, the cost

savings, i think, are not on the side of how much or how few a number of faculty members we will have, but how the student uses his or her time to get to the credentialing they're seeking. so what we use the term hybrid for is to say would have residential experiences but you have access to literally hundreds fully online degree programs and thousands of courses that can be delivered when you need them just in time, a sort of rapid prototyping that i think higher education is finally beginning to think about that digital delivery systems allow us to provide. and time to degree or time to credential is a massive cost saver. that's one semester more you don't have to take that's one more loan you don't have to take out. and i do think it will help drive completion.

but given that we are engaged in a massive open suny initiative right now we haven't found a penny of saving, and we haven't had the ability because it's digitally delivered. but then we're not the average college you've been looking at. our student leader can check me on but our tuition is relatively affordable, it's totally predictable and it's certainly our students doing their part to support the system. but completion, we say, leads to success, and here's another digital opportunity. we want every one of our students to have an applied learning opportunity. that's 465,000 students doing something to apply theory into practice. and, again, i think digital connectivity with business and industry and the social sector can enable our students of to have a more integrated learning

experience, a learning experience that's both theoretical and practical. and i think over time the digital experience will allow our faculty to finally engage in what ernie boyar began to think about here when he was chancellor of the state of university of new york, there is a scholarship of teaching and learning. the digital age is telling us more about what kids learn how fast they are how ready they are to readdress their confusions than anything we've been able to do in the lived classroom. we just know more about teaching and learning from the digital age. but i think my big suggests suggestion would be -- suggestion would be this really is about equity and access and i would like to see two stress that the delivery system -- i guess what i'm worried about is that the residential campus will only be for those who can afford it and

rest will go digital. we don't want that in our society, so i thinkwe can apply the lens -- i think if we can apply the lens of access and the cost savings of on-time completion with the realities of applied learning experience that get yoyou a job, we will have really used the digital capacity in the best way to educate more people and educate them better. >> thanks, nancy. well kevin, in 60 seconds or less -- [laughter] can you respond? then we'll have some more general discussion. >> thanks. and thanks so much to the panel for the really very thoughtful comments. they're very much appreciated. i think there are about 25 good points made, and so if i don't respond to some of them please feel free to bring them up again and ask me. i hadn't thought about the book as science fiction, but i think you might be on to something. i'm going choose to take that as a compliment. i'm a big fan of science fiction. sometimes you can write about the future in ways that allow you to look at the present in,

from new ways. and i actually agree that to some extent the science is catching up with our intuition and insight about the nature of human learning that has been with us for eons. so i don't, i don't actually believe that we know so much more 20 years, that we did 20 years ago about what good education is. i think the scientific basis for it is kind of starting to catch up with us and the theoretical basis for it. it's the question of the humanities is a really interesting one. to some extent you could from a baseline level say that if technology can't 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. the most -- and this is an important point -- we tend to

speak and have very strong yet somewhat vague aspirations for ebbs posing american -- can exposing american college students to a rich humanities curriculum. .. >> i don't think it makes sense to have someone have a start in their lives as productive citizens and workers as the

kind of education that allows them to lead a good life. i think that they are very different properties and it's far and away the most highest degree is a doctorate in business. there's not even a close second and that makes perfect sense. and i think that all of those business majors our young men and women who are going to college more or less as a matter of course because they were told to her there was nothing else to do at that point in their lives and they very logically want jobs and the white-collar economy. so if i want a job in business, i will major in business. i don't think that you can authentically look at their

experience and say that they're getting anything close to it. the book "college" it was very good and it influenced my thinking. i think i could've used some of your definitions about getting a good liberal arts education as well. but i thank you very probably try to say, here is what i think a college education provides. when i read that for the first time, what i thought was i believe in all of this there is no way to do this in four years. it just cannot be done. for years is such an arbitrary number that is rooted vaguely in history, having to do it where people are in their lives and if you're really going to

authentically expose yourself to humanities, i think that that's a lifetime project and i don't think you ever get there. i think that it's a way that you live your life and so part of what i see in the future is that there will be opportunities maybe if you want to get into the white-collar economy. if what you really want is to acquire skills and knowledge to get a first job. if you ask students why they're going to college, that's why they're going to college. if you ask them, that is why they are going. maybe you could be part of a learning community and a learning process that goes on for five or 10 or 20 years that really is your lifetime humanities education. it is an odd thing where one of the great advantages the college has is that they are one of the very few sources of tribal identity in a mobile world. we form that identity mostly around coming-of-age experiences

and relationships with professional sports teams and periodic begging for money over the rest of your life and they are in no way finished and i absolutely believe that people want creative guidance and support committee that creative guidance and support them i would argue that an organization that is curating everyone's process, is very different than one that they themselves provide. and this is what i meant when i talked about her at auction.

and we create all of the mentorship and the support as nancy said correctly the vast number of students who come into this with serious deficits of elementary and secondary education and i think that you can create an organization that can do all of the things and rather access those things technologically and it is different in lots of ways. >> thank you.

i actually want to come back and have a standardized classes. and there is a history section which everyone. and you say there are not too many alternatives to hybrids. but by the end you're saying that most attend and i'm wondering whether this dozen undercut. and this includes teaching research training professionals, all put together under one roof. there is a thing that happened intentionally over time and is isn't such a bad way to organize the university? >> it should be a good way.

>> command if you want to keep your mind alive changing this every year to try to keep up if you want to stay on your toes, there are a few things that are more valuable than being with serious skeptical undergraduates who walked out and challenge yourself to convey complex material in a way that a relatively unsophisticated student can understand. we all know that that doesn't always work very well and the research mission of the big university like this is pretty

glaring. >> one of the things it has to be charged [inaudible] and i would argue that it's a very strong balance because the research really does support the teaching and one of those important dimensions that has changed over the last decade is the strong emphasis of independent student research. the idea that the student can become in the lab they can work alongside faculty. that is the kind of thing that we really need individual mentoring and attention to do. when i think about the difference between learning online and alongside people in this kind of setting, i think one of the major differences is the mentorship of following someone you admire. what joss a student into a field. there has to be something to it.

and being part of that intellectual journey. so i would argue that the balance of teaching research is really part of the package that should not be unbundled. if one individual's go to get taught by people who aren't doing are doing research, that's not the same as being taught by those that still have an active engagement in the field. some students the brand-name schools would have the top researchers, other people will be taught by adjuncts that are receiving that information online. >> realistically how many students are working side-by-side with researchers with whom they can do progress with? >> the definition of research needs to change. we are saying that there are many forms of research.

but we need to get over what it means to be the research university and we try to engage as many community college faculty members and activity and so i think that it will break down the barriers between the traditional definition of research teaching and service. they are genius, but they need to be redefined and i believe as you do and nice. >> you're the only person here that hasn't worked for college and university. so what would you think. would it be better to kind of go back and have a standard education courses if you want to get student loan money, that is what you have to do?

>> okay so in europe a few years back there was an initiative across european countries to try to develop common ways of thinking and about competencies that would be implied by masters degree level programs and the equivalent. it was modified slightly with foundation funding and the sister association is working on how you actually create something called ugly qualifications profile. it has an associate, masters, and batchelor's lover programs and it includes the disciplinary communities and all of those things now. so when you begin to develop that level and way of thinking about competency taking chemistry as an example you

have some that you believe are common with a bachelor's degree or a masters degree, as a community not institutions by institution. >> do you want a common core education? >> that's not what i'm saying, but the community itself is starting to wrestle with that question. and so are we going to discover at the end of that journey that there are about 4200 postsecondary institutions that receive money from the federal government through title iv. are we going to discover that there are 4200 different ways of teaching the competencies as an associate's degree? maybe there won't be one but maybe there will be 100 or 200 that work most effectively for the students. those are the kinds of questions that are natural in the evolution of any institutional norm or system. as i work with them and talk to

them about these changes, what i suggest is due not just stop because of the fear of redefining things. be curious about what it means to go the next step. you ask your students to do it. be curious about what is on the other side of the conversation. the other thing that is a real question and i think for many institutions that do not have significant endowment, one of the things is you have hundreds and hundreds of students in lower division courses and then subsidize the other work upstream. if it's true that some of those lower division courses can be done well remember not the ideal version of those courses, but 600 students packed into a

psychology 101 they work with ta said her more or less well prepared to do that. there become ways to deliver education. what happens to the cross subsidy? the financial model of many institutions depends upon that cross subsidy. if even 30% of general education or says, if even some of those have been part of this and carnegie mellon shows that you can do that with at least 60 of them. what happens to the cross subsidy? and the financial model that supports the weight of the hybrid model works now. >> i want to respond a little bit. so everyone talks about this and that sort of works with

separating teaching functions the research should be off somewhere else credentialing and i hope that we can talk about a little bit, it's quite interesting. so again this comes to the question of it's a little bit like the hybrid idea but it's not only the hybrid. kevin and i were talking about the idea that maybe the counseling functions should be unbundled. and maybe you should essentially outsource it just like some people outsource their cafeteria staff to sit went sodexho. there is a distinctively brooding place, what do you think about unbundling. could you get someone else with these external entities?

>> unbundling with outsourcing is one of the cost-cutting measures that a lot of us talk talked about in 2008. a lot of us have parts of the campus where all you see are sodexho or on a company like bon appetite. and so i think that you can take that in a lot of directions and in the end, and again i speak from my sector and i don't claim to be representative of all sectors, but i think a student comes to residential college and what makes it work is not just a dean that answers questions, but one that shows up and cheers them on at the basketball game one who stops by to answer a question and knows that they are more than just number 12 on the ticket. they know who they are who their friends are and it enhances the learning process.

[inaudible] >> we outsource things that could impact students. if you look at the work of george from indiana university and we talk about how it impacts the strategies, they are the advising individuals that create pathways, which if they are not in the hybrid situation, we are going to have to figure out the online mechanisms we can get students to support that they say that they need. you can do more of that if you can get other services done by someone else. >> one thing that is important to understand about the economic argument, that's the most expensive part of college there are other things you can

outsource. information can be brought in lots of different ways. but somebody sitting down and listening to a student talk about why they're having a hard year in sending them to five different offices for advice whether it's done by a person on campus or someone online, a lot of us are doing this kind of counseling at times. it doesn't get less expensive if it involves highly competent human beings. >> the word outsource has come out. we should acknowledge that we are at a crisis point. we are outsourcing the teaching. that is when i was a graduate student, 65% of the american college staff was on edge tenure-track or it was the other way around. and more and more there are

teachers that are not really fully part of the community that are already part of the unbundling process and teachers are working at multiple institutions, those that don't have the time to spend with students with on-site faculty members like some can do. so as long as we're talking about this, we should acknowledge that this is happening and that it's a very big problem. >> it is also why advocates are seeking recognition. they are delivering in ways that they have not been delivering before and we really need to discuss the definition of that as well. >> a couple of thoughts. nancy referenced the experience that was done and so this was done for a really good outreach

organization one of the most influential researchers probably of our time wrote a book called higher education in the digital age. notably he was the second author of this book and he had been very skeptical that you could really use elegy to tear this disease which targets certain kinds of labor-intensive organizations that will always become more expensive because they cannot take advantage of the productivity of technology but competing with other organizations and it's a class that is taught in many universities. randomly assigning students to a traditional class and others to

a much more technology driven and based class and found no difference and it was just the privileged students that did well is a myth. and so that classes available for anyone to adopt. he decided to use technology by replacing this technology that is out there for everyone. i believe the answer is zero and that's because we have a individual view. we assign this to single people and maybe it's a bad joke or tenured professor and one of the

things that i talked to eric about business idea of how many of these introductory biology classes do we need one of the things is as a scientist he lives in a collaborative environment. so when he is conducting or orchestrating research he is in a constant series of relationships with other anomic experts around the world and the internet made that sort of an invisible college of scholars around the world much more part of this. they are much more engaged with their peers in other colleges because that is their people and when it comes time to take the classes, he is not in a community of people who teach genetics 101 around the world, he's basically by himself and so if he says what we really need to do is have a class where the guy or woman, who is really

great at this one piece of the curriculum the person who has spent their life on that research, they deliver that lecture. and that somebody else for this one, somebody else for this one that would be a lot more competent to put together and would require more work and coordination and we don't take that approach to developing undergraduate classes by and large in american education. he said if you did not maybe you repeat that process 10 or 15 times and you have 10 or 15 different versions of this introductory each one is a result of lots of people and you don't have this 5000 different ones and i think that that's a very different vision of how things could be organized. >> we have a few minutes.

number one i want to talk about quality. you say it universities have no idea and the new proposed a system including detailed transcripts and things that go on electronically. how do we know that it's going to be reasonable and how do we know and it's really going to be someone who is highly accomplished and number two, do you have any questions for the panel's. >> i don't know how we answer that now other than the person has a broad association with an institution that is under the umbrella of a broad process that doesn't even have this upper% of institutions at all.

it practically affects the bottom tier, it is a nuisance for all of the rest of them. it's a very expensive and annoying nuisance. and it's just that we have to do it and mostly we just kind of have to do this. so i think it would be part of a recent op-ed that i wrote. and i don't think anyone wants total standardization of everything. i think that would be under kind of great if the government could organize a group of scholars to validate a class and say that this is a good enough class rather than validating institutions rather than looking at this.

[inaudible question] >> it should create a process that you can voluntarily associate with. i'm not talking about tearing down his existing systems i think it has its own beast self-examination standpoints but is the only means of quality control that we used to attach a massive system things, i think that it is dealt to fail. >> i don't want to be naïve but frankly this is something that universities have been working on for decades which guarantees that they will bet you a generous that dataset for your institution is alive and well and doing exactly what the faculty are doing when they sit down and try to determine 70% of the class is corps and the 30% is more indigenous to that number. we have figured out a way to transfer major courses.

for a five credit courses from a four-year institution. so in these kinds of institutions, i think that we have been trying to collapse the curriculum and to some generalized abilities so that the students have the advantage of making sure that this will transfer and be meaningful to another institution and if you can do that at 64 campuses you can probably do that at 2000 campuses and it is alive and well. >> okay, so in the university of everywhere. students may have gone to school. they are going to organizations where there may be some kind of questions and some haven't been invented yet.

and then what would your thoughts be about this under kevin's model remapped. >> i would say that it's worth pointing out that we are already doing more in their classrooms and we have a professor of chemical engineering that has put a lot of short videos of lab techniques and now you can teach only one. i often thought the same that having great collaboration could allow you to save time by not reinventing the wheel and i said that that is actually happening a lot common teaching is different than it was 20 years ago. and so when i think of what the engineers are doing comment the most hands-on thing that we teach as an institution. it requires working in labs with material and i think that that is where kevin has a strong

point and i would absolutely agree with that our structure is not very fluid because we need to have better transferability and a lot of us are part of this and want to go abroad for a semester. >> i think that we would agree that the structures are too tight, but i think it's important to remember that courses are contextual. there's not one perfect as an it's probably different from a community college. there will be three different sets of students of different goals. so we worry that when we talk about finding this we forget what makes a faculty member most accessible is knowing that students are really pitching their quest to their students. >> trying to be brief, i feel the need to say this you raise the question on quality assessment. how we don't we have achieved what we are trying to achieve in

an educational environment. you mentioned this and so i actually wrote what you said how do we know if the student will emerge as a highly accomplished writer analyst. my response goes to the point that i was trying to make about the humanities being outside of this conversation, that that is nothing to do with what i look for is the value of the course i teach. what i want to know is whether a student is developing a greater sense of responsibility to other human beings and a greater sense of complexity of his or her relationship to nature. are they more thoughtful about your she is owing to live his or her life. those are questions to which i cannot possibly know the answer and what i can say is come back

in 20 years and tell me how you lived your life. that is why i think humanists tend to be grumpy and we are well aware that we represent a shrinking fraction, but i think what emanates from this to assessment measures, metrics is at least to be taken seriously in this regard because we don't want those kinds of questions to drop out of education, we don't want those business majors never to have to confront questions like that. so that is my point. >> just to go to the course extreme from that wonderfully melodic set of observations on the we touched on cost or little bit and one of the questions is whether humanities or something else whether you choose to build nuanced courses one

faculty member at a time, society is paying for this in the question for us all is maybe it is a hysteria that there's too much student debt, but maybe it's not. the society has truly reached the threshold of saying that we cannot pay, choices are going to start getting made and i think that that's the real a real question for folks in the academy at the institution. but, you know the money just doesn't come from nothing. and at the state level for state schools, they are competing with medicaid funding and that order gets last. and that is less an issue for nonprofit schools. and there is a tendency to forget that aspect where the idea of common courses is not that it would not be great if we

could tailor everything if kevin had said but that society is making choices about these things and absolutes are not one of the parameters of that choice. it's what level of quality can i afford to pay for. >> there's always a lot more to be said. but what i look like to do now is have audience members ask questions. please come to the standing microphone and we will entertain your question. you probably have 15 minutes or so to do that. i think we have one over here. the lady in the back i think you are first in line. you could tell us who you are.

>> i'm interested in the technology aspect. i think that one of the things that i have been thinking about is that there is sort of a dimension from a student perspective. why is a student going to college, and we talked about this in the opening remarks the 60s, the 70s, certain things and now i feel like most of the students that we see are essentially saying because that is what is next. but there are different kinds of things some students on a certain kind of way of learning, some sort of on a preprofessional kind of scenario. so what my question is i see not the end of college but i

need sortable world in which there's still 4500 institutions, but instead of the classifications or whatever they are maybe there are fewer of each class but more classifications in other words a diversity of kind of institutions fighting for fewer students because there's more of us. and so it becomes a much broader kind of landscape than whatever these classes are. so then i think about how these conversations become how do you live in a world where they're all there all kinds of institutions but you don't want to stratify the economic cases. so you want anybody who wishes to experience that kind of education to do that. so we can perhaps learn from

different technologies and approaches in a way that would help us achieve that goal within that context, but it is a much broader kind of institution. so my question is do you see any of that and how to use the disorder of diversity of the kind of institution affecting this as opposed to there's no more lafayette college and is now this, there's nothing the kinds of institutions with 50 different kinds of accreditation and the challenge becomes how to navigate your institution in that world so that you don't go under. we have heard about the kind of institution like that. it's just sort of what i'm thinking about as you're talking. >> i think that we are talking about many of the same things. and i feel like there are some cool things they came here. many of the strongest claims that i talk about they are

small enough to the undergraduate learning project that they really provide things that we just aren't going to get anymore is used institution. and i don't think that they are on opposite technology pools either. i write about davidson college in the book and so they don't see any conflict at all between focusing undergraduate learning, she also thinks that this kind of stuff is great and part of the future. ultimately if we are going to have broader access to all kinds of the opportunities that we want everyone to have, there are only two ways to do that from an economic perspective. we can provide more public subsidies and i don't see a necessary connection between

technology productivity in thus i reject that frame of looking at things. or we could have institutions that are not expensive to operate. what we haven't done yet is create an economic model that we can adopt this college and what they provide, but it isn't so structurally expensive as we institutions that we have now. you would be talking about hundreds of millions of dollars. giving you this example of the branch campus of the university of minnesota which they build because the mayo clinic is there and they didn't have this kind of campus. they built a two blocks away they rented out inexpensive space in an abandoned food court. none of the classes are bigger

than 30. there are only two majors. they are right near the mayo clinic. so if you want to major in health sciences and state of minnesota or elsewhere, you go there. if you want to major in something else, you don't go there. what was amazing was because they were so small and they sort of started from this the chemistry teacher and a biology teacher and the velocity future were all coordinating their curriculum over the course of a semester so that it actually made sense as students go from class to class which is commonsensical and also entirely impossible and the kind of atomized dispersed approach to authority and educational decisions. not just research universities, this goes all the way into the institutions that don't really have much of a research position at all.

so it's creating space economically from a regulatory standpoint for people to create new institutions so the old institutions can have a more concrete sense of what is possible and what they can aspire to. and i think that that is what is going to get us there. i believe that that is only what will get us there. >> the next person to come up feel free to address the panel if you have questions. >> thank you so much everyone. i would just like to have asked a couple questions. [inaudible question] and so one reason [inaudible]

we have predicted 220 years back. so whether we buy it or not it has surpassed the populations that are coming to the institute. in almost 2 million or more than that people are being educated in terms of education and then we can look at it in this way. some of these institutions like harvard and mit now they have their own models in terms of

movement. but having said [inaudible] they almost pay billions to people. but the question is how many of them can afford college education and that leads to my question which reminded me about this and society. so there is almost a kind of lawyer thing. [inaudible] so how do you believe that

higher education is a private group or a public group. [inaudible] president obama. >> we have to stop because we have a lot of people in line. >> [inaudible] >> sure. i mean, i believe wholeheartedly but i think that that is a contested notion. we are new to the idea of building human civilizations that have any aspirations to provide broad educational opportunity to the citizens. that is not something that is

part of anyone's history it is one of the you know i think it's very much a cornerstone in terms of the opportunities that we provide and it's fragile. i think that one can only reasonably observe where we are today and say that it is in decline just in terms of how many of our public leaders talk about this in terms of supporting higher learning. and so it is complicated because i'm fully aware that some of these arguments can be used for some of these purposes and i take seriously the threats that we say let's do it on the cheap and so it doesn't even concern some. i think that we need to move forward to a vision of higher education that uses more student

centers, it uses more authentically effective that will fulfill the promise of what the public sees which is a combination and a balance of higher education as a source of knowledge and enlightenment in the production of knowledge in all though it is the core educational institution. and i do believe that is connected to how we relate to the rest of the world quite frankly to be a little bit cynical, i think that many american universities look at the rest of the world and say that, where can i find a wealthy dictatorship to make my campus, or where can work you can send me this to help me balance my budget this year. we need to do better than that. we need to do a lot better than that. >> if i could just as ask everyone to be brief because i'm conscious of our timetable, we will have a reception.

please go ahead. >> hello, i traveled three hours to be here and i'm very excited. and i have a question when you are talking, i was excited because i teach technology to teachers and research to teachers and i can see myself in this but there is one thing that is missing. i cannot see that going in this kind of environment. >> thank you very much, great question. >> i don't think that the university is free everywhere. i think somethings you can drive

the marginal cost down to zero watching this is definitely one of the but human relationships are not one of them. if we can get to a place where the things that can be low cost or low cost, that will free up money to put more money in the source of support and mentorship that many college students to knock at in any kind of substantial way. there are some interesting organizations and i talk a little bit about in the book that are trying to find ways to also tackle and that is some kind of intermediated technological way i think that that's promising as it does, but i think that everyone lives somewhere, most of us live among a lot of other people. so i think that we want to have basic interactions. but that is what we do that will be very different and a lot better. >> we are really great to improve the support system that can also be online and we are learning about that.

so we are not standing still on the issue but it may not always be in person. >> clearly it's hard to be a mentor to each of them. is there a way where the students still feel the excitement of engagement and the commitment of that information and still getting that from someone who is not? >> you know one of the questions i would ask the audience and the panel is what happens if you combine some of the low cost access to content that kevin would argue with an institution that is built around being a mentor. you end up with just to be provocative i will say it, you end up with an institution that is not built on the hybrid model at all that he describes all. and it's like i understand that

one of the things that has been humbling for me as i am new to the think tank community and it has been to discover one of the core challenges of where you are leading and teaching institutions today. you know, the kind of ideas that kevin introduces are not just provocative ideas but they are peoples paychecks in the way that they do work today. and so i think when i work with the provost i get them to say stop for a minute and think about what if you built an institution today around mentoring and you added the disciplinary content around that model. but what with that institution look like that is different than what you do right now? it's an exercise that helps him think outside of simply preserving what they do. >> thank you. what i would like to do is have the next two questions back to back her a quick and then we can

talk about those questions further. and then we will have a response >> hello, intervening in a university of albany, i want to take up the cross subsidy question and ask whether the highbred would let us build a mediocre to good undergraduate experience and world-class research enterprise and whether the transformation might lead us to have a world-class undergraduate experience in a not so good research enterprise to great question next one please. >> hello, i'm from colombia university. a lot of the talk and comments remind me of the idea of what we do when we are dealing with a major scale crisis and there are

great things and terrible things historically. what does the human story mean when we have things like climate change, how do we use technology to extend the range of access beyond the privileged and insular walls of the university and provide that not only minutes to education but one that is mobilizing the power of the core curriculum to address these bigger questions like climate change, and resourced scarcities. so to what extent is this vision going to be serving? >> that is one way to think about it. last question, please. >> hello, i'm on the board of trustees, how do you see the university -- trying to serve under, i'm trying to think of the were that i was going to say -- serving underprivileged

students. >> thank you very much. we have time for a quick response. >> i'm going to start with laurie because i think that the online opportunity is the democratization of access to education. i'm not sure how it's going to end, but we have so many young students that are not making it through even on the portal to college. so we cannot afford to examine this outside of the lack of a coherent pipeline to college. and we have millions of adults in america and around the world who are under educated. i do believe that we have to find a way to translate what we are saying into this. >> what was the first question again? >> the idea of equity. >> okay. >> we are already seeing this

was a with randomized controlled trials that technology can be used to educate well folks that are less academically prepared and that is going to allow us to explore how that kind of innovation can help. we have a separate dialog about the politics of that and how do folks get prepared with technology as well, and there is a question and one is what technology can do and what we as a society can do politically to support it the bridge to that so that we do not have stratified systems. >> thank you. i like the way that that question was articulated because i think it's exactly the way that many of us have.

but the cross subsidy is the whole reason. it's why you can have one department serving another. or serving more individuals efficiently so that others can take a seminar. so when we think about this, i was relieved to hear kevin described his hope that part of what is part of this is going into other things. but if you unbundle the whole thing so there's no one institution that's responsible for the overall learning experience, what ensures the continuation of this and the general pursuit of knowledge even in the more utilitarian way the more expensive and harder to achieve but equally important areas of student endeavors that are not going to be efficient but have to be subsidized by someone somewhere. >> i imagine a lot of people would agree. i'm glad that the equity question is front and center. i would just observe as many of

you know that we live in a country where young people in the top obtain college degrees at a rate somewhere between 2.5 or six times depending on who's deity you believe is young people and the bottom. so my comment is simply that i hope that the universities everywhere will make those numbers better rather than worse and maybe it will be in terms of college completion but other terms. and i worry that if we do achieve this kind of cost efficiencies that kevin and others envision, it could turn out to be next for reducing subsidies further than they already are. >> thank you. >> maybe we could try to touch on a world-class teaching and the extensive research to sure.

i believe that in the end you make a strong case for public support and support institutions that are effective and efficient saying that it ought not to be quite frankly. it's fascinating and fun to read, one of the fun things that i got to read doing research in this and it shows how institutions have been taking seriously this kind of contentious question and they are translating that in some ways to show how difficult it is even if you begin with the best of intentions to really navigate the realities of institutions as we designed them. the question of this between research and teaching is very important and observations like we don't tell students that's the we don't tell students that the way to his essay just so you know, 40% of your tuition money

is going over here to this other thing. but i don't think that that is true. no one said anything like that, i think that they take for granted delegation that there is a seamless support and no hard choices there. but that being said it's a danger and there are certain kinds of research that have value in the market. there are certain kinds of research that are strongly supported by public institutions , whether from the defense department or the national institutes of health, there are other kinds of work that have no market value that there is not going to be the federal government providing huge amounts before them that scholarship is in danger by what i lay out, the book does not have a solution to that problem all we can do is hope that we keep it in mind. that might seem like a satisfactory answer to those that really believe as i do in

the role that the university has plated in transmitting civilization from one generation to the next, it is close to a sacred responsibility as one can have from his deck of a perspective on the world. and i believe that it could be the first thing that is lost. i'm glad we're talking about this. >> i would like to thank all of you for joining us this afternoon. we have had some revolutionary provocative views. and i think that we have had a lot of shades of gray and i think that is going to make this a rich and ongoing discussion in the years ahead. and i want to thank the terrific set of panelists and kevin who took a redeye from arizona to be here with us today which we really appreciate. make you all for being here and please join us at the book signing in the reception.

[applause] >> you guys are great, thank you so much. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> you are watching booktv on c-span2 with top nonfiction books and authors every weekend, booktv is television for serious readers. >> this weekend on booktv, grover norquist discusses the tax system on "after words." and the sinking of the lusitania and the united states entry into world war i we will bring you book talks on the relationship between fdr and stalin, the history of money, and the use of public shaming and the in the internet age and you will be able to watch as c-span's newest book rolls off the printing