throwaway20485

I think we're actually overall aimed at similar things then, I'm just emphasizing the need for the integrity of university admissions processes as it's pretty easy to dismiss that as elitist gatekeeping as the initial excerpt in this thread somewhat did (and admittedly sometimes it is - but that is not its raison d'etre). Primary education will never be "fixed" - but it is the right place to try to make most of the progress needed on these underlying issues.

If what you're talking about is more (robust/tested) MOOCs as a way to qualify for higher education, more structure/accountability for self-directed learning/availability of material, and a wider funnel in terms of more vocational education/opportunities - I'm absolutely on board, and would see those as suitable improvements to primary education. I'm just giving you a heads up that, in the US at least, most actual initiatives that try to "spread opportunity" don't do any of those things (too much work/investment needed), but really do just push for lower bars in higher education (wider funnel in terms of "let more people in to the thing we're doing anyway") and result in dilution of material. And yes, that does harm the value of the degree, as demonstrated also by jobs now looking for graduate degrees when in past undergraduate would have sufficed.

This is absolutely an area where the US could stand to learn from the standards and practices of its global peers. Sadly that is unlikely in the current environment.

Sadly, I can say from experience that the unsustainable view is that we should err on the side of admitting people regardless of demonstrable skills or relevant background. They are of course still people - but people who may need something other than higher education, and again it is not on higher education to fix all the ills and injustices of society (it can of course help - but it can't solve upstream issues).

Re: the rest - read my upthread comments, suffice it to say I am supportive of broad opportunity and personally am a fan of MOOCs. But there's a difference between making material available and providing a supportive curated learning experience (which is what people expect when admitted into a university, and is essentially necessary for a research environment), and for the latter holding students accountable to standards really does matter.

It sounds like you have some interesting ideas that could be applied towards improving primary education (intermingling with MOOCs, etc.). That's great - as I said in my first response to you, advocate for those (I also agree that vocational education could help - that's part of what I was hinting at with "specialization" and "alternatives"). I particularly like your description about how it really did gate on the actual difficulty - that's pretty infrequent in these initiatives from what I've seen. That plus a robust test at the end could lead to a trustworthy credential used to apply to future opportunities.

Research institutions and competitive/graduate programs need to maintain quality in order to advance their field, and need to be selective to do so. The best fix for inequality is to fix it at the source, but to maintain an insistence of the actual value and integrity of the material. It hurts both individuals and the system to dilute and give people participation badges for passing through, and that is the approach I have more commonly seen when people push for "broad accessibility."

The quality issue is always the issue :) regardless of time or medium.

Certainly agreed that existing institutions (educational and otherwise) need to figure out how to effectively function remotely. Remote accessibility is a separate problem from scaling and reducing entry requirements - Harvard can (and likely will) have essentially the same students, just using Zoom rather than walking around campus.

And the point of my argument is that the main goal of admissions requirements and selectivity is in fact pedagogical (supporting an effective learning environment). Yes, there are branding/ego aspects, but again this is not a simple discrete 0/1 problem. The space is continuous, and "scale" is simply not the answer.

If your goal is making great knowledge readily available, then MIT OCW and many other existing MOOCs have really already solved that. They do it by simply putting it out there, but not formally evaluating/crediting participation. This is all great, and is I believe the right way to scale accessibility without diluting the focused experience of the institution itself.

There are absolutely terrible problems of inequality through nearly all levels and areas of society. Unequal opportunities, inherited economics, social class - these things harm lots of lives.

But no, it is not realistic to expect higher education to magically fix all of this at the end of the pipeline by simply having a wider mouth. That's going to/already has significantly harmed the actual value (and signaling value) of a higher degree. It just doesn't fix the problem to more widely apply a treatment that only works when certain prerequisites are in place - competitive programs look for those prior experiences because they really do prepare you for deeper study.

There of course should be (and are) undergraduate institutions that are not that competitive, whose charter is to educate those with relatively less opportunity earlier in life. The 85/87% numbers in the original parent comment however suggest that they are discussing either a competitive department or graduate program within a university - and their charter is and should be to advance the truth and quality of their field.

In other words - yes, give folks a chance. But don't expect higher education to fix a bunch of upstream socioeconomic problems (try to get primary education fairer first), and "give folks a chance" means "broad access to general undergraduate education" (and then still some standards, i.e. being willing to fail folks or guide them to alternatives), not "open all the gates to everything and scale it up."

Or tantamount to an institution trying to preserve the actual quality and value of the education by avoiding grade inflation and watering down of material. Many homeless shelters have standards and will reject people who are a threat to the quality of their environment - there really are students who are the (learning) equivalent.

This is a hard problem. But the mantra "scale education" ignores the quality side, and somebody who is shuffled through a "scaled" experience without personally investing and then given whatever credential at the end is still not actually competitive for a job and isn't being done any favors - they've just invested a lot of time in something without much personal value. What's worse, they've diluted the perception and thus value of the educational experience for anyone else who attended the same institution, even those who did take it seriously and learn.

People still send rejections for bad reasons (ego, etc.), and the cherry-picked 85/87% example seems illustrative of that. But the answer to education isn't scale - it's quality and specialization. Not everyone really wants an academic experience, as anybody who has spent serious time at a school can attest to (throwaway because I'm in that group).