Universities want to raise fees because of the economic crisis. Their endowment funds and other sources of income are down. They wil either have to get more funding from the government or charge more in fees, or increase the size of classes. In most countries the fees for public universities are a fraction of the true cost of going to university. I wonder, if students had to pay the ful cost, let us say, over $25,000 per year, how many students would stil attend universities, especial y if they could achieve the same educational results for less money.
I know there are issues of credentials, but I think these issues can be dealt with separately and more cheaply.
Many of the courses offered at university, especially in the arts and humanities, are of little practical use. Much of the knowledge contained in these courses can be acquired by reading books. iTunes University is offering more and more courses online. A recent report points out that students get more out of spending time on their iPods than in lecture hal s. If it is language learning, there is LingQ and other online resources.
The average length of a university year is eight months, so that means that the university costs about $3,000 per month. The average student takes five courses, so the true cost is about $600 per month per course. Most students are undecided as to what courses they want to study, and even if they are decided, they often cannot get into the courses they want. They often end up having to take unpopular courses, given by a professor who does not want to teach, just to get their credits. Yet someone is paying $600 for each student to take each one of these courses.
Now let's assume that one of these courses is a foreign language. Typical y a student taking, say, Italian, would have 3-5 hours of class a week, plus access to a language lab. Now if I had the choice between spending $600 a month to attend a university language class or getting an iPod and learning the language via the Internet at places like LingQ, I know what I would do, especial y if I had to pay the money myself, or could pocket the money, as long as I achieve certain learning targets.
But it is not just languages. Most students study "liberal arts" or "humanities" at university.
The last statistic I saw showed that only 20% of university students studied engineering or science.
How about a new approach to arts learning? We know that the majority of university students in North America study arts and humanities. The US spends $25,000 a year per postsecondary student, compared to $10,000 per year per K-12 student.
At the combined elementary and secondary level in 2005, the United States spent $9,769 per student, which was 38% higher than the OECD average of $7,065. At the postsecondary level, U.S. expenditures per student were $24,370, more than twice as high as the OECD average of $11,821.
I assume that in Canada the costs are less, probably around $20,000. Assuming an average of five years at a post-secondary institution, this would amount to $100,000 per student.
Now what if, say in Canada, on graduating from high school, every person got a humanities educational provident fund of $50,000, which they could use to purchase educational services, books, online courses, coaching, courses at different centres of learning or whatever, over their lifetime.
And what if this money could also be used for in-depth testing for the purpose of obtaining degrees, certificates, diplomas and the like. This money would earn interest and could be used at any time in the life of the citizen, but only for wel -defined educational expenditures.
A friend recently asked me to participate in a one day seminar on citizenship put on by a local university, Simon Fraser, as part of their "Semester on Dialogue" program, described as fol ows on their website. I have highlighted certain phrases.
"The Undergraduate Semester in Dialogue addresses what we believe is the principal chal enge for contemporary education: to inspire students with a sense of civic responsibility, encourage their passion to improve Canadian society, and develop innovative intel ect ual tools for effective problem solving. Each semester we develop an original and intensive learning experience that uses dialogue to focus student education on public issues."
The site goes on to say:
"Dialogue is a particularly effective educational paradigm, involving col aborative listening and learning to discover meaning among diverse participants, and is best conducted in the context of citizenship and civic engagement. Dialogue offers helpful ways to relate to one another, and leads to better-quality outcomes than the adversarial, position-based discussions that typical y characterize debate about complex issues. Dialogue-based processes build deep relationships through free expression of views and respectful exploration of differences, with positive action emerging through mutual understanding around sources of agreement and disagreement."
I am not entirely sure what al of that means. I was not aware that the principal chal enge of contemporary education is to inspire a passion to improve Canadian society. I am certainly aware of other major challenges including poor literacy. But assuming that this —improving Canadian society—is a major chal enge, surely there wil be various positions, and even conflicting positions, on how to do this. People's interests and ideologies differ. Surely, in reality, there wil be a need to go beyond a ―respectful exploration of differences", as these different positions come into contact with each other. At some point people wil have to debate and try to defend their positions, and decide which positions are more useful. And not everyone wil agree. Not al positions are equal y useful nor equal y worthy of respect. I doubt if a love-in of ―col aborative listening" can achieve very much.
At any rate, at this one day seminar the students presented us with largely a monolithic "position" on multiculturalism, and when I and others questioned this orthodoxy we were either ignored, or attacked. There was not much listening by the students, col aborative or otherwise.
During our one day conference we were divided into groups around smal tables. We were encouraged to doodle, draw and write down "whatever came into our heads" onto large paper sheets on our tables, just like in kindergarten. These were then gathered together and combined to represent our col ective ideas. Doodling is col aborative, I guess. Our student moderators were trying to get us into the mood for col aborative doodling by leading serious discussion on citizenship with questions like, (I am not joking), "What is your favourite Canadian movie?" "What is your favourite pastime?" "Should five year olds have the right to vote?‖
I prefer free discussion without manipulation. I agree where I agree, and disagree where I disagree. I do not col aboratively listen. I listen to understand. A conversation is by definition a dialogue. The goal is not to effect improvement, but to exchange views and ideas and bring facts forward. It is an opportunity to try to defend one's own opinions, to discover holes in one's own position, and to explore the positions of others. This is best done with no special rules or assumptions about col aborating to improve things. In any case, differences of ideology or interest soon expose all this col aborative theology as bogus.
How effective are the existing language tests for English? How do we know what our skil level is in another language? How can other people best judge our skil level? Is our own subjective evaluation enough? Is it possible to standardize the evaluation of language skil s?