Newspapers are dying. Are universities next?
For many, the answer could be yes, says Kevin Carey, policy director of Education Sector, a Washington think tank. Writing in the current issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Carey argues that both industries are in the business of creating and communicating information.
It's clear that newspapers are in a death spiral. The Tribune Company, owner of the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune, is bankrupt, as is the owner of the the Philadelphia Inquirer. The Rocky Mountain News and the Seattle Post-Intelligencer are gone, and the San Francisco Chronicle may not last the year. The New York Times' debt has been downgraded to junk.
All of this is happening despite the fact that the Internet has radically expanded the audience for news. Millions of people read the New York Times online, dwarfing its print circulation of slightly over one million. The problem is that the Times is not, and never has been, in the business of selling news. It's in the print advertising business. For decades, newspapers enjoyed a geographically defined monopoly over the lucrative ad market, the profits from which were used to support money-losing enterprises like investigative reporting and foreign bureaus. Now that money is gone, lost to cheaper online competitors like Craigslist. Proud institutions that served their communities for decades are vanishing, one by one.
As I've explained over the years, leaders of old paradigms have the greatest difficulty embracing the new. Why didn't Gannett create the Huffington Post? Why didn't NBC invent YouTube? Why didn't AT&T launch Twitter? Yellow Pages should have built Facebook and Microsoft should have come up with Google. And Craigslist would have been a perfect venture for the New York Times.
So far there is no Craigslist equivalent in the education industry, says Carey. That's because teaching is more complicated than advertising, and universities are sitting behind government-backed barriers to competition, in the form of accreditation. "Anyone can use the Internet to sell classified ads or publish opinion columns or analyze the local news. Not anyone can sell credit-bearing courses or widely recognized degrees."
Doubtless universities today are as confident as newspapers were ten years ago. The confidence by some is justified. "Tony liberal-arts colleges and other selective private institutions will do fine, as will public universities that garner a lot of external research support and offer the classic residential experience to the children of the upper middle class."
But less-selective private colleges and regional public universities, by contrast -- the higher-education equivalents of the city newspaper -- are in real danger. To survive and prosper, says Carey, universities need to integrate technology and teaching in a way that improves the learning experience while simultaneously passing the savings on to students in the form of reduced tuition.
One thing for sure. The smartest students want to get an "A" without having ever gone to the lectures. They understand that there are better ways of learning than being the passive recipient of a one-way, one size fits all, teacher-focused model where the student is isolated in the learning process. When the cream of the crop of an entire generation is boycotting the formal model of pedagogy, the writing is in the wall.
Don Tapscott recently led a survey of 11,000 young people around the world. He has written 13 widely read books on the impact of the Internet on society. His 1997 book Growing Up Digital defined the Net Generation and the sequel, Grown Up Digital: How the Net Generation is Changing Your World, was published in November 2008.
Follow Don Tapscott on Twitter: www.twitter.com/dtapscott
College is a joke. Don't go to college. Find a business you like and work for them and later, start your own. College is not a ticket or a prerequisite to anything and anyone who tells you that is either a fool or a liar or both.
You have to have some historical perspective. Even back to the 17th century, people were allowed to wipe out their debt after 7 years, despite all the other injustices. This current law- no bankruptcy for student loans - is the most draconic, anti-American thing imaginable.
Article 1 section 8 of the US Constitution confers on Congress the power to establish bankruptcy laws throughout the United States. That fact presumes that bankruptcy is something that EXISTS doesn't it? But for you, it does not exist. The right to be relieved from crushing debt is a basic right that all people's in all countries at all times have understood, but the banks have reached into the US Constitution and withdrawn that right from you.
You see that banks are able to declare bankruptcy after extreme malice and fraud, but you who went to school, studied hard, earnestly sought to find and hold gainful employment, worked 12 hour days, then got screwed by globalization / outsourcing / downsizing CEOs who fire you and up their pay have no recourse- you're a wage slave for the REST OF YOUR LIFE because when you were in your 20s you didn't understand what Wall Street and the bankers knew with great certainty- wages are being depressed for everyone but the top fraction of 1%.and paying 60 or 120 or 200k for college is a very very bad idea and a debt that the debtor will naturally seek to discharge through bankruptcy.
Look, you have the internet and direct access to the entire world who in turn is willing to be your customer if you can provide value for them in some way. You're better off living cheaply with your friends, working at whatever you can (which is what a lots of and lots and perhaps the majority of graduates end up doing anyway) and trying business idea after business idea until you learn something and get it right but having NO DEBT and thus being FREE rather than defaulting on your loans and watching your 60 k college education spiral up to a quarter million, that is, destroying your chance in this life to ever, you know, work for gain, have anything, like, say a home or even a car, be anyone or anything other than someone who owes a bank a lot of money.
Why do you think banks got "no bankruptcy" laws passed against student loans? They look at the numbers, they have access to longitudinal data, not to mention the fact that they know what their own plans are, and they know the probability that you'll get a job which will enable you to pay back that loan is very very low. They know IT'S A TERRIBLE BET and THEY'RE not going to take it unless it's backed by the gun of a no-bankruptcy provision.
You'll have paid back $260,000.00 or a quarter of a million for having gone to school. Do you really think you're going to make so much money with your BA or BS that that's a good deal? Really? With IBM outsourcing a few hundred thousand software development jobs to to India this week and Microsoft investing a few billion in a Chinese IT center where their software's going to be written?
Do you really think that what you do is going to enable you to escape global labor arbitrage if those kinds of jobs can be outsourced?
Do you really believe that some company's going to pay you an EXTRA 1,000.00 a month take home (1500.00 a month gross) above and beyond your need to pay rent, food, gas, utilities, cell phone ,internet, insurance and save for your own kid's even more costly college education?
Unless you majored in alchemy and got an A all the way through, I'd advise you to think again.
(end part 1 or 2)
If anything imperils higher education, it is its prohibitive cost. University education should be free for everyone, but even before that the federal government needs to take control of K-12 schools and assure that the quality of children's education is equal and does not depend on the tax bracket of the school district.