Abstract
Smart policy-oriented economists know how to deploy the analytical tools that will generate answers to questions bearing on important policy choices; wise economists recognize the limitations of those tools. Courageous economists who have changed their prior position based on new evidence, publicly acknowledge the change. In Higher Education in the Digital Age, based on his Tanner lectures at Stanford, William Bowen, author of several important books on higher education policy and former President of Princeton University and the Andrew Mellon Foundation, demonstrates that he is all three. After an initial chapter (and lecture), masterfully summarizing the evidence concerning the rising cost of higher education and the increasing burden this places on students, Bowen argues persuasively in his second chapter (and lecture) that he now thinks technology, online learning in particular, holds the key to reducing those costs without sacrificing educational quality.
As a policy-focused economist, Bowen finds it natural to conceptualize educational outcomes in quantitative terms. Consider his report in Chapter 2 of a rigorous clinical trial that compared the learning outcomes of students taking a ‘hybrid’ statistics course – that is, a course that combined online learning with weekly face-to-face class sections against a traditionally taught course that had no online component. Bowen and his associates ‘found no statistically significant differences in standard measures of learning outcomes (pass or completion rates, scores on common final exam questions, and results of a national test of statistical literacy’ (p. 48, emphasis in original) between students enrolled in the two formats. These results may surprise some opponents of online learning, but they are hardly decisive. Bowen, in contrast to most educational researchers, economists especially, acknowledges that the most significant outcomes may not be those that lend themselves to quantification: The half-life of content taught in a course can be short, as we all know; but great teachers change the way their students see the world (and themselves) long after the students have forgotten formulas, theorems, and even engaging illustrations of this or that proposition. (p. 68)
Near the end of the book, Bowen describes a course he took from his mentor, William Baumol, in which he learned that though he may not have been the quickest student, ‘given time and persistence, I could actually figure many things out, . . . I learned to have a kind of quiet confidence in what it was possible for me to achieve’ (p. 158). I only wish Bowen had given more space to discussing how these kinds of outcomes could be captured in a way that would permit them to be integrated with the quantitative analysis. I think he has begun to do that: in another article on the statistics course trial, Bowen reports asking students whether the course raised their interest in the subject matter. That’s a beginning, but much more needs to be done if we are to curb the educational researcher’s proclivity to assume that test scores and other quantitative measures, such as time to degree, capture all significant educational outcomes.
Although Bowen does not believe that ‘online learning is a panacea for this country’s deep-seated educational problems’, (p. 70), he does believe that ‘the broader structure of higher education is likely to change quite profoundly due to the emergence of online courses’. Here, Bowen echoes a core Marxian insight that when there is a tension between what Marx called the productive forces and the production relations, it is the latter that must give way and adapt. Bowen believes that introducing the new learning technologies will require changes in how decisions are made at the institutional level; universities will become more centralized, and the autonomy of individual faculty and individual university departments may need to be curbed. Such changes will, indeed already have, evoked faculty resistance, as Bowen acknowledges. The truth of the matter, one that Bowen alludes to but does not dwell on – perhaps out of prudence, perhaps because here his courage fails him – is that when machines replace human labor power, be it in the ‘production’ of human capital or of automobiles, then not only do some people lose their jobs but entire occupations may shrink, even disappear. Bowen does not think the new technologies will ‘lead to diminished interest in high-quality residential education’ but what about lower quality residential education?
One scenario futurists have limned is the survival of elite residential universities attended by the privileged with the rest of the population taking the same courses online at home. As an empirically minded economist, Bowen does not indulge in this kind of conjecture, but I wish he had sketched a few alternative visions of what higher education might look like in, say, 25 years. Suppose these futurists are right. Would this be a terrible loss? Why? How could we tell? Here’s work for philosophers and social scientists.
One feature of the Tanner lectures is the opportunity given to a few scholars to deliver responses to the lecturer. Here, Harvard education professor Howard Gardner and Stanford President John Hennessy offer responses to Bowen’s first lecture (Bowen et al., 2013); Columbia humanities professor Andrew Delbanco and Stanford computer science professor and Coursera cofounder Daphne Koller respond to the second. 1 Bowen then gives brief responses to the commentators. The respondents offer thoughtful challenges, but I wish they had been selected from non-elite universities, for these institutions, not the Stanfords and Harvards, are the primary targets of Bowen’s analysis.
Perhaps the best way to see what’s at stake in the introduction of the new technologies is to compare Delbanco’s response to Koller’s. Delbanco worries that online learning cannot provide the excitement and transformative experience possible when a small number of students and their instructor sit around the seminar table interpreting a classic text. He documents the point convincingly by reading an email sent from a student to one of his teaching assistants after a section meeting. Koller maintains that a Penn professor got similar comments from online students taking his contemporary American poetry massive, open, online course (MOOC), and she notes, correctly I believe, that the typical student in a public university never has the kind of opportunity Delbanco describes. Bowen, in his own final response, claims that the real challenge is to use the resources saved by ‘machine-guided learning (in fields in which it makes sense), and allow those savings to be used to do the other kinds of teaching that are so important’ (p. 161). But if the purpose of the introduction of online learning is to lower the costs of higher education, who would promote this reallocation?
Now the key issue here – can the mediated educational encounter provide the same educational value as the unmediated – appears to be empirical, awaiting adjudication in further clinical trials, but appearances are deceptive. If, as all thoughtful students of education, including Bowen acknowledge, the durable impact of a course is not captured in a test score or course grade, then it is difficult to see how the relative merits of the two approaches can be ascertained, at least not with current methodologies. That means that it is important for thoughtful voices like Bowen’s and Delbanco’s to continue to be heard lest the quantitative fundamentalists have the field to themselves.
Higher Education in the Digital Age provides an outstanding overview of the financing of higher education in the United States and the most fair-minded introduction to the issues surrounding online learning that I’ve encountered. Bowen’s argument is clear yet nuanced, and his commentators raise the right questions. Anyone seeking to explore these matters in greater depth will find a treasure trove of resources in the unusually rich footnotes.