The End of College

Arum and his coauthor, Josipa Roksa, found that 45 percent of students made no gains on a widely used test of critical thinking, analytic reasoning, and communication skills during their first two years in college. Thirty-six percent made no statistically significant gains over the entire four years. “American higher education,” they wrote, “is characterized by limited or no learning for a large proportion of students.” (Location 163)

The classical world had teachers and students but no deans (Location 248)

Everything about the University of Bologna reinforces the idea that colleges are eternal institutions, unchanged through enemy sackings, plagues, papal feuds, and world wars. (Location 258)

a university was a collection of scholars, or students—universitas scholarium—while a “college” was a guild of masters. (Location 275)

The image of a professor reading from a lectern as a roomful of students write down the words he speaks—an experience familiar to anyone who has attended college—is rooted in this pre-Gutenberg era of higher education. (Location 316)

THE FIRST IDEA FOCUSED on how colleges could help the waking giant of the American economy. (Location 378)

The second big idea about what college should be came from overseas. After the Civil War, American scholars who traveled to Europe began returning with stories of a new kind of institution: the German research university. (Location 395)

The third big idea was liberal arts education, a notion that many people favor and fewer can adequately explain. (Location 406)

Thus, America was confronted with three very different purposes for a university: practical training, research, and liberal arts education. (Location 433)

The doctorate was “a sham, a bauble, a dodge, whereby to decorate the catalogues of schools and colleges.” (Location 490)

“The Yale of my day,” he later said, “was a place where you could get excited about girls or liquor or parties or athletic contests, but it wasn’t a place where you’d get excited about learning.” (Location 698)

What results is a kind of mutual disarmament pact among college professors and students: Neither is asked to work very hard, the professors get to focus on the research they care about, and the students all get good grades. (Location 1252)

Suppes found that the learning variation among elementary school students of the same age was enormous: Some progressed through the curriculum five or ten times faster than their peers. (Location 1350)

“The millions of observational records that computers now process in the field of nuclear physics,” Suppes wrote, “will be rivaled in quantity and complexity by the information generated by computers in the field of instruction.” (Location 1371)

In 1922, Thomas Edison said, “I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of text-books in our schools. Books are clumsy methods of instruction at best. (Location 1394)

The Army then tested the groups to see how well they could use a micrometer. All three groups performed exactly the same. (Location 1438)

In fact, human learning tends to proceed along a logarithmic scale, with the first rounds of practice producing meager results that eventually accelerate and result in gains that are orders of magnitude more powerful. (Location 1492)

To solve this problem, Sieg developed a computer program with the vaguely steampunk name “automated theorem prover.” It uses artificial intelligence to solve proofs entirely on its own. (Location 1610)

In 2013, William G. Bowen, the noted economist and former president of Princeton, published a study comparing the learning outcomes of two randomly assigned groups of students. One group took an interactive OLI statistics class, plus an hour of face-to-face instruction. The other took the same course in a traditional on-campus format, with three to four hours of instruction. When Bowen and his coauthors compared how the two groups fared in terms of “course completion rates, scores on common final exam questions, and results of a national test of statistical literacy,” they found no statistically significant differences. (Location 1649)

If a professor adopted free curricula, teaching materials, and lectures from MIT or Yale, then what exactly was the university paying him for? If a university department used technology to teach the same number of students with fewer professors, then it had fewer professors. Departments want more professors, (Location 1711)

When it comes to teaching, colleges and universities do not want to be more productive, and will do whatever they can to avoid such a fate. (Location 1716)

It’s like a world where Craigslist needs the local newspaper’s permission to give online classified ads away for free, or Honda has to build cars exactly like GM. (Location 1722)