The Washington Post ran a big piece yesterday contrasting the expansion ambitions of HEI systems in New York state and in California, with the gridlock on higher education expansion experienced in Washington. The unquestioned assumption in the WP, however, is that expansion is a good thing: that future economic development depends upon an ever larger provision of degree-educated workers. The Presidency agrees, but getting anything done in Washington is like pulling teeth — on a really annoyed, rabid dog.

But it is just this assumption that is being questioned, from both right and left. Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and the nation’s favourite liberal economist, argues that recent evidence suggests graduate-level employment may have plateaued, in part because automation can deal with sophisticated, graduate-level tasks much more easily than it can with skilled but ‘common sense’ tasks, like installing an air conditioner or pruning a pear tree. Interestingly, an opinion piece in Forbes agrees. Both conclude that tackling income inequality through higher education is a mistake.

The UK experiment with vastly expanded higher education provision would seem to be relevant here. Are graduate level jobs holding up, and graduate level unemployment staying low? Another, very different question arises, the answer to which everyone above just assumes: is access to higher education only about the economy? Even in the domain of equality (see the immediately previous post), is income equality the only measure?

Interesting, if rather sketchy, piece in the New York Times on future ground-level transformations in degree level study. MOOCs, the author claims, have failed to transform the higher education landscape, not because they are not popular (they are, and looked at historically, spectacularly so), but because of the accreditation gap. By this is meant the meaningfulness of any study certification to employers. Taking a MOOC, or even twelve of them, is a hobby. Certification of the study of individual MOOCs does not evidence knowledge or skills, and certainly not a comprehensive competency in any subject. These latter features — standing for definite and guaranteed knowledge, skills and subject competency — remain the preserve of traditional degrees.

What is changing now is not just that some course offerings are upping the rigour of their certification process, but that series of courses or systems of certification are arising. Now, take twelve MOOCs from this series, and the certificate means something; collect ‘badges’ from various sources, and again this demonstrates something to an employer.

Now, this is directly analogous to standardised schemes of credit accumulation, such as CATS. The system in the United States is among the oldest and most well understood such scheme. A student can take 30 credits at the University of X, add 60 more from Y College, and then round it out with another 30 earned while working for Z Corp — and that is a degree. Those three institutions know this; employers know this. Does it work? Well, sort of. It is certainly easier to transfer between institutions than it was 50 years ago, but it is still not exactly common. (A degree itself remains much more portable: taking your BA from X to study for a MA at Y is very common indeed.) However, the relative rarity of intra-degree transfers likely has more to do with geography than some other form of intertia. Usually, one has to physically change residence to get from X to Y.

Online education changes this. Now, the problem is that Mozilla, Coursera or EdX are not recognised degree-granting brands. So, even if their systems for accumulating elements of online study are robust, it will take a long time before they serve the above purpose with respect to employers. So, there will remain a role for traditional education providers, as providers of course, but also as brands that carry recognised weight.

UPDATE: The President of Stanford University weighs in on this issue. His is what you might call a centralised or federalised vision of higher education, where the best providers (i.e. the best teachers, i.e. those at Stanford) provide digital content for other universities, with some local help. Well, duh: that’s what university-level text-books have been for a century, with later enhancements like video (pioneered by the OU) and dedicated web-sites. The real innovation would be finding a way to make this responsive to individual student needs and interests, a goal that Hennessey does not seem to realise cuts right against the centralised model.

As part of an overture to the state legislature, in the middle of a funding allocation cycle, the University of California system has volunteered to cap out of State and international student numbers. See the Reuters report. The issue is a familiar one to us. International students pay premium tuition fees and thus are sometimes seen a subsidising domestic students — or, more cynically, seen to be subsidising other University expenses. (In the UK, the international premium is less at undergraduate level and only really pertains to postgraduate study. Also, in the United States, state universities charge different fees depending upon whether the student is resident in the ‘home’ or ‘another’ state. So, a big chunk of California’s premium fee income is undergraduate out-of-state students.)

In California, just as it sometimes is here, the perceived problem with this arrangement is that the recruitment of international students edges out domestic students. Interestingly, the issue of whether international students are getting a good deal somehow never arises… Quite the contrary, in fact, as this rather snide report shows.

Change a few place names in this Time article, and it could have been written about the UK Higher Education Sector. Food for thought for anyone who thinks the US system is a model for the rest of us.