For the last year, there has been constant talk about fee deregulation within Australia. This has made me think what precisely would I advised myself, if I was finishing up high school this year. Expert opinion suggests that fees would rise in imitation of the US college system. In this thought experiment I will divide it into three broad areas:

  1. Global Education Trends
  2. University Experience
  3. Practical Thoughts.

But firstly, what is the goal of post-secondary school education? There can be many different answers, each will deeply impact the direction which you want to take your education. For example,

  • One might think that the goal is to continually specially and develop knowledge, primarily for your own edification; to be a better person.
  • It could to be contribute to the knowledge of humanity.
  • Perhaps it is to specialise and acquire certification to practise in a specific area.

With each one of these reasons leads to different approaches to your university education. For this article, I will only consider the first point; attending university for the goal of your own personal edification.

Global Education Trends

It isn’t surprising that the advent of the internet has meant that the number of online degree programs has increased (whether they are seen in the same light will be discussed later). With the advent of broadband in particular and MOOC platform has indeed transformed the landscape with now online degrees or at least university credit being offered in each of the major MOOC platform.

  • Global Freshman Academy with ASU and edX, this is not a complete degree, but only covers freshman year at ASU
  • iMBA, the Online MBA program with UIUC and Coursera
  • OMSCS, the Online MSCS program with Gatech and Udacity

Along with lots of unofficial certification programs from each of the three major providers, in the form of nanodegrees from Udacity, XSeries from edX and Specializations from Coursera. These all hope to enforce some kind of informal accreditation process as recognition of completing a series of courses as offered on their platforms.

Furthermore, for many years MIT has been releasing their coursework for free, allowing self-learners to thrive.

On common criticism is that MOOCs have a low completion rate. Even though paying for enrolment do lift up the completion rates, it is clear that its traditional format of success probably isn’t the same as a normal university program. Even worse, despite its attempt to unify the world, by providing cheap education for all, it is generally those who already possess a degree who make use of the MOOC services.

Even within Georgia Tech’s offering, I have noticed that the withdrawal rates of courses were higher than on Campus, though it is worth noting that in general the grade distribution and work completion for the students who didn’t withdraw were similar to on campus. There could be a variety of reasons why this is happening.

  • Students performing online degrees were most likely to be families due to bias in selection (peopole who apply for the program are more likely to be working, and cannot possibly be completing this degree full-time).
  • The degree requires you to have a minimum grade of B in specialisation to complete, meaning students may drop out of courses more readily.
  • The price point is lower enough that it encourages you to enrol in as many courses as possible, thereby dropping the ones which we don’t care for.

And cost, indeed is one of the great driving forces for MOOCs, from the ASU offering costing ~$6k USD for cost of 1st year of university, iMBA estimated to be $20k USD altogether and OMSCS aiming to be $~7k for the whole degree, we realise that these costs are indeed comparable costs for undergraduate degree and significantly less or comparable costs for post-graduate degree, (which of course is why I’m thinking about this in the first place). We can see that in the US alone there is the ability to compete against the Australian higher education system.

What about Europe? Within Europe, for many years there are pockets of cheaper and high quality education due to government subsidies. Indeed within Germany, anyone, both local and international students can choose to live and study a degree for free. Judging by the admission requirements in Europe and internationally, instead of performing the state specific examination, one could instead attempt the International Baccalaureate instead, however it is generally not accessible for the general population, since it belongs generally to private schools; though there are probably methods to convert the relevant state exams to the German abitur equivalent.

The University Experience

One interesting observation I have noticed is the differences in culture when comparing Australia to American colleges. For example, the universities generally house many more people, with UNSW easily have over 50,000 students enrolled at one time, whilst American colleges are in general much more exclusive.

As such in American colleges, students are more likely to know each other and live on campus; something which would be impossible within Australia. This means that students are more likely to live at home. Also in America universities fees include all facilities such as food, and gym, whilst in Australia, all of these things are extras, which generally means that again, this experience is rather disjointed.

General comments about the online nature of college being detrimental to the university experience in Australia feels quite frankly deflated. That is not to say there are not friends or connections to be made; quite the contrary, without many of my university friends I would not be in the position I am today; they have indeed had a huge influence on me over the last few years.

When there is a will…

Steve Jobs has said several times, that he would sneak into a lecture if he was to learn. Now in today’s age with MIT’s opencourseware, this is probably no longer relevant. Regardless it brings up an interesting point:

Could the university experience be manufactured if you weren’t even a student of the university?

This is a notion which is interesting, but relatively uncertain. Truthfully I would say there is an aspect of our lives which would be disconnected if we were to move overseas or online for our education.

Overall it is difficult to gauge what would happen in the increasingly connected generation. In general we would hope that we would become more intune, but ironically it is increasingly demonstrated that we become increasing disconnected with reality. I think the experience of learning in general is something which would need to be reformed not only from a graduate level education, but also K-12, in particular the constant and pointless testing which only seems to be increasing year after year.

Practical Thoughts

Now many people will quite rightly state that accomplishing education in areas such as law or medicine may not be easily transferable from overseas degree back to Australia, or simply cannot be completed via distance learning. This is definitely true.

What about reputation? Or practicality of the ultimate job? Finding a job?

I think this question is relatively unanswered. It is no surprise that people in general like to hire people who have backgrounds similar to themselves; actuaries would hire actuaries even if the role does not require actuarial work. People with MBAs tend to hire other people with MBAs.

But at the end of the day, this degree, the certificate is all but a line on your resume, and perhaps we really should pursue our education for our edification instead of prestige.

Notes

I truly believe if I gave myself this advice I, as an 18 year old would dismiss myself. I’m not too sure whether it would actually be successful in taking such a gamble like this.

Personally I feel many of the degrees which would work in a format of study outside of Australia are the STEM degrees, and to a lesser degree commerce/economics degree. Beyond that, I think it is either not practical or not worthwhile to even pursue a degree in the first place. Of course this is coming from a person who of course would promote those degree.

Of course one could argue you might even be able to learn enough without a degree, though the number of people who succeed in that way are mostly the exception, not the rule. There is also the rise of bootcamps to upskill people which from a practical standpoint is very interesting. I think the future will increase more and more of these institutions, which provide “learning on demand”. These are probably in a sense the way of the future, provided you have the adequate background beforehand. For example, the Zipfian academy which aims to convert people with PhD’s into the data science, though I am not too sure about coding bootcamps which aims to tranform non-coders into coders in 12 weeks.