With all the information available for free on Wikipedia, YouTube college lectures, and various university websites, I think we have gotten to the point where an intelligent person can get a PhD-equivalent “education” from free Internet sources and be as learned as any Harvard, Johns Hopkins or MIT graduate. Essentially, a $100,000 education for free.
The hypothetical conditions: Cannot expend a single penny - (aside from, of course, the cost of a computer, mouse, keyboard, Internet, etc.) No paying for online classes. Cannot read any textbooks, etc. outside of the Internet.
Doable or not? Poll to follow.
What are we calling the equivalent of a PhD? Do you mean somebody has learned the amount of information that a PhD will have learned? Sure, I think that’s possible.
Nope, at least not in most fields. A PhD isn’t about learning a ton of things that other people already know (though that’s a necessary part of the process). Rather, it’s about figuring out how to learn things that nobody else knows about. That requires some amount of access to a research subject, which requires physical lab space in a lot of cases. Most importantly, it requires a lot of active and challenging discussion with community of skeptical experts. There aren’t many forums on the internet where you can find thesis-defense levels of discussion.
Bingo. Maybe you could get a Master’s level education from the Internet, but PhD students have advisers for a reason. In fact, come to think of it, a PhD program is kind of an apprentice program. You learn how to approach a new area, you learn how to critically judge current work, and you learn how to express yourself through writing papers.
Plus when you get a PhD you participate in doing paper reviews, which block bad stuff from the domain of published work - something not done at all on-line!
Many of the courses I took in grad school were seminars. It wasn’t so much the reading material we learned from, but rather the discussion of the material.
Agree with lazybratsche. A Ph.D is not about book learning. It’s about demonstrating your ability to do original research and getting it published. It’s closer to an internship than college. Yes, there are some “graduate level” courses, but that’s a tiny portion of graduate school work.
Depending on the field, if it is purely library research, data analysis and theoretical work, it may be possible to mentor a Ph.D student remotely through the Internet. But without mentors and peers to interact with, I think it’s extremely difficult for someone to do Ph.D level research on his/her own, just by consuming publicly available material.
Also, at least in my field, academic journals are not free. If you’re not enrolled in a university, and not willing to spend a lot of money, you can’t even read research papers to catch up with current research.
No, at least in my field that would be completely ridiculous. As has been mentioned, much of the learning involved comes from discussion with your major professor, committee members, and fellow students.
Besides that, most textbooks are not available on the internet for free. In addition, you have to review the current and older literature, and the vast majority of journal articles are not available on the internet for free (and the older literature may not be available in digital form at all.) You can access most journals for free through a university library, but you would need to be enrolled.
No, this isn’t possible (and it wouldn’t be possible even in a world where all academic books and journals were available for free online, although it would be a lot closer to possible in such a world). Getting a PhD is mostly about acquiring skills, not factual knowledge, and most of those skills are acquired through mentoring, interaction (with both faculty and fellow students), and completing original research in the field.
I agree with all who say this, but add that even an undergraduate degree isn’t just about acquiring lots of information. My own college education consisted of far more than just reading and listening to lectures: it included lots of writing of various sorts (research papers, critical and argumentative essays, mathematical proofs, problem sets) and having that writing read and critiqued by experts. It included lots of class discussion. It included lab work.
We may be at the point where a person can have access to all of this, or a reasonable equivalent, online. It’s not all free, though, and I’m not sure it’s reasonable to expect that the parts involving personal attention and feedback from experts ever will be.
IIRC, Harvard and MIT have all their courses online for free, so you can get the equivalent of a bachelor’s degree. (It won’t count unless you pay tuition.)
If the graduate courses are there, too, the it’s already possible?
Formal, non-seminar graduate courses are only a minor part of a Ph.D. I didn’t take any for the last three years at least of my research and writing up.
Could you become a musician just by reading books on music theory?
What MIT, Harvard, and other institutions offer online are lectures. They’re a great resource, but they’re not even close to a bachelor’s degree equivalent. Even if the primary method of instruction in a course is lecture, the lectures themselves aren’t the entire course. The vast majority of lecture courses include discussion sections (very difficult to conduct effectively online) or lab sections (impossible to conduct online), and all of them include reading and writing assignments of some sort. (A very dedicated student with access to an online syllabus might manage to complete these assignments on his or her own, but wouldn’t get the feedback on them that is also part of the course; most students are not that dedicated.) They also include, in most cases, opportunities to ask questions and interact with faculty that just aren’t there for someone watching the lectures online.
I’d also be very, very surprised if there’s any institution where you can get a bachelor’s degree by taking only lecture courses. Most colleges require, at the very least, some lab science and at least one semester of freshman writing; many require other subjects, like foreign languages or public speaking, where human interaction is pretty much necessary to learn the subject adequately; the majority of undergrad majors include at least a few small seminar or practicum courses. None of these are the kinds of courses that usually get filmed and put online; they don’t make for riveting watching, since they’re all about doing.
And to get back to the topic of grad school, graduate courses are virtually all seminars or practicums, so they’re rarely a good match for the “filming lectures and putting them online” model.
Hm. I voted “yes” because I figured that talking with other knowledgeable people in the subject area would be something that could be done for free on the internet, but maybe that is stretching the premises of the original question.
The web is a step up from a textbook - you CAN ask the web a question.
Education is more about learning HOW to learn than just knowledge.
And the web is a long way from a real discussion with the proper people.
When we all have drones videotaping us 7/24, it may be possible to engage a real person in a semi-real discussion. There will be people who see a way to make quick cash (Trump University?) and package x hours with real academics and call that a “College Education”. That diploma will be worthless.
For my PhD, there were four main requirements: coursework, examinations, teaching, and the dissertation. The courses were mostly seminars, with a lot of discussion, but also a research paper. The main point of the examinations was to make sure I had an understanding of the entire history of the field. The teaching aspect dealt with mostly the introductory elements of the field. The dissertation, as per the standard, was a significant original contribution to the field.
The knowledge accumulation bits of the field could be acquired over the internet, although I suspect that some guidance on what’s worth reading and what’s not and why and how it all fits or doesn’t fit together would be of immeasurable help. Where the internet seems to fail is in the knowledge production bits. You could write papers, of course, but who’s going to read them? Who’s going to critique them? Who’s going to publish them? And this is not a negligible thing. This is arguably what a PhD is for. Teaching seems almost impossible, but you could make a good case that that’s a more of a professional than academic requirement.
At MIT every undergraduate has the opportunity to participate in research, something just starting when I was there. That’s not something you are going to be able to do online.