I was inspired today by the article "E-Commerce companies bypass the middleman."  Choice quote:

 "they discovered that everyone in the process was taking a cut: designers, manufacturers, brands, wholesalers and retailers.  But what if they left out most of those people?"

That is exactly what the higher education industry needs. One professor.  Twenty students. everything else is outsourced at cost.  Scale up to maybe 20 professors with 400 students and you have a Bachelors. Twnty professors can easily

• Teach a complete liberal art, science or even engineering curriculum
• Decide on important things in committee, such as
• Whom to admit
• Whom to graduate 
• Where to meet
• Whom to hire to replace retirees
• Where to buy supplies
• Collaborate to contract out simple tasks, like
• Photocopier maintenance
• Janitorial services
• Graphic design
• Tuition payment processing
• Cloud computing services
• Outsource for free the things that used to cost, like
• Content creation
• Citation metrics
• Student social networking
• Homework distribution and collection

I only wish anyone (including myself) cared enough to make this happen....

I am trying to be the opposite of this in my brevity, but maybe I am too cautious.  Joe Baugher describes at length and with a mixture of crisp clarity, deep insight and careless cut-and-paste editing, a system, r rather a set of related systems, that all share the same flaw: it no longer allows quality to rise.
With today's technology, it is entirely possible and increasingly necessary to start from scratch in our approach to higher education, precisely defined as education overseen by those actively engaged in creating new knowledge.

New article today.  Basically says students need more hand-holding than online courses give; much more in the case of community college students and possibly less for graduate students.  I'm surprised it's not obvious.  The value proposition of having a professor and a student actually interact is expanded, not reduced when the main conduit for information to the student is a massively open online course (MOOC) rather than a printed textbook.
What this really means is that the infrastructure that was built around the value-adding professor-student interaction over the past 3,000 or so years is becoming more and more precarious, less and less unassailable, with this new technology.  This to me seems too obvious. What is less obvious is how we arrived at having such a surfeit of rent-consuming accouterments that have come to surround the interaction and which have also come to define the world's perception of a university.  I can name a few headings under which to explore this question - the question of "Why?" 

1. Benign influences:
1. Local optimization
2. Trust and reputation
3. Network effects
2. Malign:
1. Bureaucratic self-preservation
2. statistical stereotyping
3. confirmation bias.

I'll expand on these in future posts.

Students seek professors. The spend a few years doing whatever it is professors and students do. At the end, the professor pronounced the student "graduated". Society at large recognizes the value of the student who has had this experience. After several gradations of graduation, the student might decide to pursue the path pf becoming a professor too. Or not.

So underneath all the Latin and posturing, there really is a continuous arc from from Pythagoras and his order or Plato and his academy, to massively online courses, for profit colleges, and Ivy Leagues. Everything that has happened in between can be described as addition of third parties to the interaction of professor and student. This is necessary when it is a value multiplier. Three professors and a secretary can serve more students than four professors.  But how does the process end?

My thesis is simple and I will present it simply and up front.  The Academy/College/University is an institution   founded on a single value proposition.  The proposition is that studying, however loosely defined, under the guidance, however loosely defined, of a professor, has intrinsic value.  The definition of a "professor" in this formulation is not loose.  A professor is someone recognized by society as being able to profess - i.e. to state things about the world that have a valid claim on being true.  This is contrasted to the classical definition of a professional, who is someone who has made a commitment to a single profession, i.e a way of life, but is not expected to continue to profess on a constant basis.

Some people almost get it.  Some don't have a clue.  But higher education worldwide is inching toward a crisis.  And the nature of the crisis takes some thinking to figure out; hence this blog.  The symptoms are quite clear for all to see. Here are some:

1. My kids can expect to pay more in one year for college than I did on four.  Same college.
2. While I am told to cram 60 students in a graduate course to help make ends meet at the university level, it takes only 15 to pay my salary, benefits and operating expenses.
3. Governments everywhere can no longer afford to subsidize universities to the same level as before
4. College loans are the fastest growing sector for consumer debt in the USA
5. People can take courses for free because the marginal cost of one more student visiting a web site with a video and a auto-corrected quiz is almost zero.  But this everyone is nervous about how long this largess will last.
6. There appears to be a very successful business model that operated on selecting the top students from any major and paying them three to five times the average salary to be management consultants for as many years as they can keep up.  The university is a spectator and sometimes victim of this (e.g. when students cut short their research to take an offer or skip class to attend day-long interviewing sessions.

What is going on here?  How are these related?  Come with me and find out.