Thousands of qualified, trained, energetic, and underemployed Ph.D.s are struggling to find stable teaching jobs. Tens of thousands of parents are struggling to pay for a good college education for their children. Home-schooling at the secondary-school level has proved itself an adequate substitute for public or private high school. Could a private home-college arrangement work as a kind of Airbnb or Uber for higher education?
Read the whole thing. Pointer from Tyler Cowen.
I could do this. I could easily teach college-level courses in economics, statistics, history, and philosophy. This would be the opposite of Massive Open Online Courses. It would be College Of One Mentor, or COOM. As Robbins points out, higher education used to work this way.
Education does appear to be ripe for unbundling and disintermediation. However, just as with banking, there is a tight link between education and the state.
“Home-schooling at the secondary-school level has proved itself an adequate substitute”
Should I brace my door for the mountain of apology letters?
Robbins is right that higher education used to work this way – but the higher educated, in this system, were those who already had either the family wealth or connections they needed, to be sure of elite status after they finished their studies. For most students at bricks-and-mortar elite institutions, “education” is as much or more about making connections – and not with professors, unless they plan to become professors themselves. It’s their fellow students who will open doors for them after graduation. Elite institutions prosper in large part because they offer enrollees the assurance that they’ll both meet and share intense personal experiences with plenty of fellow students who’ll be able, after school is over, to open the right doors for one another. So a one professor-to-a-few-students model won’t be appealing to most people.
That said, I think a “COMM” system could work. As I point out in my post on Robbins’ article – http://litnow.com/could-home-college-work/ – an association of (well-credentialed) private tutors could compete with elite institutions, by offering students the chance to study with a number of such teachers, and, through these study sessions, meet and be able to network with one another.
So, you think you are qualified to teach philosophy at the college level. To me such a statement implies that you could explain things to students based on your own understanding of the sources and not just based on what you have seen in a textbook. Accordingly, you read Ancient Greek or Latin (preferably both) as well as German or French (preferably both); you have pondered Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel, Descartes, Rousseau, Spinoza, Locke, Nietzsche, Pascal, and a dozen others in some depth; you have a passing acquaintance with a few major works of non-Western philosophy; and, to be well qualified, you have published a paper or two in philosophy. Yes? Somewhat similar considerations apply for history.
The vast resources available online take much of the burden of knowledge off of the mentor, who can act as a guide through the content available through things like MOOCs. See http://www.phlegmaticblog.com/2014/03/homeline-college.html.
Been there, done that.