What value does a college really offer?!

[Voyager]

@brickbacon

Colleges could do many of those things by doing the following:

1. Embrace technology. Some colleges are doing this, but far too few are using technology in ways that reduce labor costs and/or add value to their product. For example, online courses can greatly reduce costs while providing similar value.

We can save this thread yet!
MIT is putting its stuff on line. Lots of for-profit colleges are heavily on-line. Whether this method works is still to be seen. It can probably impart information just fine, but I’m not sure about the other aspects of an education. If we are preparing people for jobs above that of drones, there is a lot of interaction and teamwork, something which can’t be found in an on-line environment.

2. Embrace (More) Cost-Shfting. Colleges are not only more expensive because of cost diseases, they also DO far more, and pick up the slack for a number of other institutions and industries. At some point in the recent past, we decided that the vast majority of research and job training should occur on college campuses. That choice comes with added costs. There is no reason why, if Exxon wants more competent geologists, that they shouldn’t contribute to the costs of training them. Or if Google needs better software engineers, they should help universities train them to their specifications. Colleges then can use the money and guidance to incorporate more real world training into their curricula.

If I’m not mistaken, in Japan companies assume they must teach new hires everything. here we are going in the opposite direction, as companies want to hire people who can start immediately, and consider a college ivory tower for not teaching the application of the day.
Unless Google can indenture the students whose education it is supporting, why support training for kids who will work for its rivals? In my area there is a lot of university support at the graduate level, with the partial expectation that the student will join the company, but it often does not happen.
We also must worry about the long term. The more theoretical classes I took in college and grad school - like programming linguistics, graph theory and complexity - have been a lot more useful 40 years later than IBM 360 Assembler, PL/1 and Multics. The call for real world training is sometimes an excuse to let companies hire new grads with the latest knowledge and toss out old grads whose knowledge is now obsolete.
Also, real world training can be expensive, in time and money. In my area a lot of research is done requiring circuits, and I’ve been very active in providing some real world benchmarks for universities. However most papers are still using benchmarks from 23 years ago, which were fairly simple even back then. A lot is because most students just don’t have the time to get into an open-source microprocessor design and do anything interesting. That is something that can be handled for free, more or less. If you try to implement things, it gets real expensive. I built logic circuits out of some small components and wires - now you need FPGA development systems and test stations.

3. More cooperation. Right now, competition in a number of educational arenas is what is increasing their costs. One school get a new stadium, then everyone else has to. One school gets a new hospital, then other in the area do. Universities, especially those in the same area, need to cooperate more often in non-competitive areas, and in areas of innovation.

Good idea, but one which might be only accomplished by funding for cooperation and no funding for going it alone.

4. More Specialization. Universities should specialize more often, and limit the scope of their goals. It’s better to have 10 schools each focusing on one or two broad areas (eg. Science, Tech, Teaching, Economics) than 10 schools trying to do everything.

This happens to some extent, since some universities are a lot stronger in some departments than others, but you don’t want too much of it or else you might lose synergy. My daughter’s research is somewhere in the mix of psychology, economics and marketing. Not having a business school at her university would be very limiting.

5. Expand Successful Brands. This is another thing colleges are only staring to catch on to.

Actually catching on quite quickly. There is a CMU software engineering institute in Silicon Valley. MIT is doing its online courses specifically so as to not open lots of satellite locations which might cheapen the brand. So while colleges have monetary incentives to do this, it can be dangerous. Unv. California schools have satellite campuses also, but they make the distinction quite clear between taking a class there and really attending.