Watching the Ivory Tower Topple

From the Wall Street Journal online:

Spring break is winding down, and college students are heading back to campus—which, if they're at a name-brand school, is the one place, whatever their actual smarts or behavior, that guarantees them approval.

Kids don't put Harvard stickers on their rear windshields, parents do.

But for how long? These schools have ... impressive students, organic dining halls, presidential alumni. To maintain their reputations, however, elite colleges have long relied on limiting access—Harvard's class of 2015 is about 1,700 students, Yale's is 1,300—and that may be coming to an end.

Revolutionaries outside the ivy walls are hammering their way not onto campus but straight into class.

...Last fall, a couple of hundred Stanford students registered for Sebastian Thrun's class on artificial intelligence. He offered the course free online, too, through his new company Udacity, and 160,000 students signed up. For the written assignments and exams, both groups got identical questions—and 210 students got a perfect overall score. They all came from the online group.

...In this new educational model, the shy and the easily distracted get advantages. You can rewind a video and watch whenever and as many times as you like. Plus, teachers save time with computerized grading and students save money. (U.S. college debt, nearly $1 trillion, is bigger than housing or credit card debt.)

Most important, the system promotes driven and talented students who might otherwise be denied access to higher education: a kid in Afghanistan, a young mother in Scotland, an ignored pupil in Detroit. From Mr. Thrun's class (translated into 44 languages) Udacity chose 200 students based purely on performance and, a few weeks ago, forwarded their resumes to companies including Amazon, Bank of America and BMW.

There are glitches, of course, including a high online dropout rate, complaints about speed, questions on accreditation and the predictable whining from old-school alumni who have gotten too cozy in their club chairs.

To be truly egalitarian, classes will need to go not just online but mobile. Still, the upshot of it all is clear: more smart people is better. Just watch that ivory tower topple.

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Link: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304636404577293430981335366.html?mod=WSJ_hps_sections_careerjournal