3 ms·

One thing that concerns me about this is how will research get funded. Currently undergraduate students cross-subsidize research.

• Turing_Machine 14y ago
  Increasingly what the tuition dollars actually fund is layer after layer of bloated administration. Teaching and research are generally the first thing to get cut when budget cuts loom, never the hordes of junior associate vice subdeans. Even when you get a research grant a large percentage of it (30-50%, sometimes) gets chopped off for "overhead" (i.e., the aforementioned hordes of administrators). I don't know if MOOCs per se are the answer -- likely they're part of it, but not the whole solution. However, I do know that higher ed is ripe for disintermediation. Basically, you've got a group of customers who are used to paying tens of thousands of dollars for a service, while the people who actually produce the service are getting paid a very small percentage of that. The situation is especially striking when it comes to large lecture classes of the sort common at the various campuses of Enormous State University. You've got sections of 250 students or more (maybe a thousand or more students across all section), each of whom is paying on the order of a thousand bucks to sit in a large lecture hall and listen to the professor. So maybe $250K per section, or a million for the whole course. The adjunct professor teaching the course is probably getting paid ~$2k-3k per section. If that reminds you of the situation that formerly prevailed in music and book publishing, it should. Accreditation is the sticking point. That's going to have to be revamped or an alternative mechanism will have to be devised.