Tag: 100DaysToOffload

The (monetary) value of a university education during a pandemic

Posted on January 15, 2021January 15, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

Claudia Webbe MP: "Charging £9,250 tuition fees for university by zoom or microsoft teams is daylight robbery

Yesterday, Claudia Webbe, a Labour MP, called purely online university education provision during the current pandemic “daylight robbery”. She cited the maximum fees that universities can charge students in England and Wales.

I had some thoughts about that, which I put in a Twitter thread, but am saving here to refer back to. (I regularly delete my tweets.)

The fees are a product of government policy. Hence universities are in the impossible and unenviable position of both having to operate like businesses in a marketplace *and* be subject to government interference.

When I did my doctorate, I did pretty much all of it online and paid £££ for some very good supervision, access to stuff I couldn’t easily get other than through the uni library, and… the qualification at the end.

As has been written about at length elsewhere, credentials are signals to the job market and other groups. University degrees have historically been top-quality signals, but that’s less and less the case in the industries I work with. People want to see what you can do.

This is not to say that universities are just about credentials, or that those credentials aren’t valuable (I hope they are for my sake!) What I am saying is that there are other ways of packaging up knowledge, skills and understanding. Open Badges, for example.

Universities, because they’re acting like businesses, don’t have as much goodwill from the general population anymore. Especially given the general distrust of experts generated by the right-wing media over the last decade. They need to tread really carefully.

New approaches like ‘masterships’ where you get a Masters-level qualification while learning on the job are currently provided by orgs like Accenture in collaboration with universities. It’s a win/win for employer and employee, but for the uni…?

I can foresee a situation, which is probably already happening, where elite research centres are decoupled entirely from teaching, learning, and credentialing operations. As that happens, the latter function becomes more and more focused on employment.

For ~£9k you can do a 480-hour bootcamp over a few months with an org like General Assemblys and get a well-paid job at the end of it. No debt after a year. Now, I’m a graduate of Philosophy, History, and Education degrees, but I’m not sure I’d advise my kids to do traditional uni.

So back to the tweet from the Labour MP. She’s absolutely correct, despite the protestations of academics and those who love higher education (like me). You can get daily feedback to quickly develop employable skills, which is more important than ever in a pandemic.

So how will higher education respond? Who is nimble enough? I feel like the main problem is the pseudo-market created by the government. Many unis can and want to respond more quickly, but they have baggage and regulation that others do not. Sadly.

This post is Day 84 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.

Power and paths

Posted on January 6, 2021January 6, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

One of the big influences for me when I started personal blogging, as opposed to blogging about education, was Zen Habits. It doesn’t look like it, but it’s one of the most viewed blogs on the web, with more than two million readers.

It’s written by Leo Babauta, who was recently interviewed on The Tim Ferriss Show. The podcast episode a great listen for a number of reasons, but I want to focus in on one thing that’s touched on briefly.

Babauta explains that he has six children, with four from his and his partner’s previous marriages, and the two they’ve had together. Some have gone to school, and some have been unschooled:

Unschooling is an informal learning that advocates learner-chosen activities as a primary means for learning. Unschoolers learn through their natural life experiences including play, household responsibilities, personal interests and curiosity, internships and work experience, travel, books, elective classes, family, mentors, and social interaction. Often considered a lesson- and curriculum-free implementation of homeschooling, unschooling encourages exploration of activities initiated by the children themselves, believing that the more personal learning is, the more meaningful, well-understood and therefore useful it is to the child. While courses may occasionally be taken, unschooling questions the usefulness of standard curricula, conventional grading methods in standardized tests, forced contact with children in their own age group, the compulsion to do homework, regardless of whether it helps you in your individual situation, the effectiveness of listening to and obeying the orders of one authority figure for several hours each day, and other features of traditional schooling in the education of each unique child.
Wikipedia

The point he makes is a simple one: if children are always brought up to be told what to do next, to be given a path, then how will they find a path of their own as adults?

He doesn’t make the connection explicitly, but my next thought was that this is perhaps why the default option for most people after school / college / university is to get a job in a hierarchical organisation with a boss telling you what to do.

The radical thing to do, and the thing which is much more empowering, is to reject persistent hierarchy and coercive power relations altogether. Instead, approaches such as consent-based decision making are the way forward. No-one needs someone telling them what to do all of the time — including children.

This post is Day 83 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.

The end of competition

Posted on January 5, 2021January 5, 2021 by Doug Belshaw

The period of time I spent at the end of December consciously not working is one of the first where I wasn’t either (a) explicitly in competition with others, or (b) implicitly in competition with myself.

Competition can be good. It can be motivational and help us strive to be better / faster / stronger. But, too often, it can be damaging and cause us to act in ways that aren’t beneficial to ourselves or those around us.

I’ve been a gamer all my life and so the idea of beating myself (as a kind of ghost car) has always appealed to me. But, having reached the age at which almost every elite athlete has retired, I need to stop kidding myself that I’ll ever run a sub-20 minute 5k. That’s OK.

In addition, I’ve come to understand the approach my mother took to family board games when I was a child. She refused to play to win, instead making sure (as far as she could) that my sister and I never finished last. As a parent, I get that now.

A competitive approach to life is often justified by talking about “preparing young people for the real world”. It’ as if the so-called real world is red in tooth and claw. In my experience that’s not the case; the ‘real world’ is more focused on collaboration than competition.

So, perhaps we’ve got things backwards. Maybe the reason adult life involves competition is not because of the nature of the ‘real world’ but because capitalism demands competition, and so we bake it into childhood.

All of this has made me realise that while competition still has a role in my life, it’s a diminished one. I need to put it back in the box where it belongs, to be taken out where appropriate.

The rest of the time, I should be collaborating, helping bring attention to those who deserve it. That’s instead of (and it pains me to admit it) seeking the reassurance of “doing better” than others. We’re all in this together, after all.

This post is Day 82 of my #100DaysToOffload challenge. Want to get involved? Find out more at 100daystooffload.com.