Higher education and many other publications. He now has a regular gig at the new york times. He makes his professional home at the new America Foundation and he directing directs the Education Policy Program there. And, of course hes the author of end of college, which well be talking about today. But i thought id also tell you a few things you might not know about kevin, because he contains multitudes. As a blogger, he has established a reputation over the years for finding excuse and i really mean any excuse to write about the education policy implications of shows like the wire and friday night lights. And when you read his book, youll find references to downton abbey, to game of thrones, and theres probably others that i missed. Im going to be very disappointed in his talk today if kevin doesnt at least mention Better Call Saul or the serial. [laughter] hes a musician officionado a student of the perhaps tease and although shes trapeze and i would urge you do not make the mistake, as i did, of referring to the tram peez as trampolining. Kevin also takes on some unexpected topics. He wrote a really fibroand memorable essay fine and memorable essay a while back about how learning Computer Programming made him a better writer. And although kevin certainly sees himself as a man of the left, when policy preferences align, he is definitely not afraid to make common cause with the right. He once wrote a long i new remix piece praising the higher ed program of thengovernor rick perry of texas. And the headline was rick perry is a Higher Education visionary seriously. Now, there are some people in Higher Education who consider kevin a provocateur, and maybe thats right. Provoking a system thats badly in need of selfexamination is a big part i think, of what kevin sets out to do. He cares a lot about equity and opportunity. And he certainly doesnt mince words. In the end of college, we read about the, quote systematic tragedy of a grossly expensive postsecondary system that is quote, shamelessly shamefully indifferent to undergraduated learning. Undergraduate learning. Kevin isnt just critical of universities, to be father. In his final chapter he advises students. He says, quote put down the bong and get to work. Now, kevins always worth listening to, hes always worth debating. And were going to have both today with a short talk by kevin, some reactions and conversation from a great panel and, finally some awed a yens questions. After that audience questions. After that well go to a reception outside where there will be books available for sale and signing. Please join me in welcoming my friend and colleague, kevin carey. Ms. Thank you ben, for the wonderful introduction. I am a proud graduate of binghamton university, so you can either feel pride or regret in that depending on what you think of my book and the conversation we have today. It was Robert Maynard hutchins the very well known president of the United University of chicago, who wrote in his 1930s book the idea of the university, still a very modern approach to thinking about Higher Education and the book begins along the lines of the most important thing to understand about the university is the confusion that besets it. And in many ways, the first part of my book which is a history of american Higher Education is the story of that confusion. Where it came from and what it continues to still mean today. And i think i dont believe anything that it says, that the book says about the history of american Higher Education is really all that contested or controversial. I claim no original scholarship. Many of the ideas have been represented in books of Higher Education history that have been used for a long time. The book talks quite a bit about how in the formational period of american Higher Education in the late 19th century we decided or allowed to happen an organizational model that stuck together three essential purposes; the Research University which came from germany, the mission of practical training represented in policies like the moral land grant act, and the broader ideals of liberal education. Not my framework, you can go back to the seminal history of american Higher Education, the emergence of the American University which was published 50 years ago. Actually, still a wonderful book and still in print, to read about how that happened. And to me, the amazing the interesting thing is almost as soon as that happened, people inside the i academy kind of looked at the system and said well that doesnt really make a whole lot of sense to try to put together a Research University and a liberal arts college in an organize thats meant an organization thats meant to train people for practical fields, for the labor market all in one place. William james the famous prague mat u. S. Philosopher wrote ans essay called the ph. D. Octopus where he made the offense vegas that the things you had to do for a ph. D. Had nothing to do with whether or not you were going to be good in the classroom. He said it was a sham, a bobble a dodge which i picked as the Second Chapter of the my book meant to throw dust in the eyes of the public, to to fool people into thinking the university was something other than it was. Probably one of the most famous College Professors in American History taught at columbia in the 1930s and 40s and had a career that went all the way to the end of the century. Theres a chapter called the ph. D. Octopus, his continued heated agreement with what Williams James had said 30 years prior, made all the same points. But by that point it was much, much too late really for the University Organizational model to change. Theres sort of a well known phenomenon where once organizations become a certain way, they become more like one another over time. This is just kind of basic organizational theory. So the question that interested me was why it has persisted for so long. These kinds of things happen all the time. Organizations form in certain ways. They get used to the way they are, and eventually someone comes along with some new way of doing things and the world changes. And yet virtually everything that hutchins said about the university in 1934 you could say about universities now, 80 years later. Why is that . I believe that it has a lot less to do with the virtues of the model and the inevitability of the Higher Education model as we know today, than kind of an epic string of good luck that in some ways i dont think we can expect to continue. It was, of course a great virtue that the American University model was made in america and not, say in europe where many of the great Higher Education institutions were decimated during the catastrophe of the beginning of the 20th century. Our universities were in the ascendant Industrial Power of the age in a tremendously wealthy, growing nation a nation of immigrants where people were looking for means to uplift their children and saw colleges and universities as the way that you would do that. The first nation in the world to decide that it would be a good idea to try to get everybody through high school. A nation with a congress that in a sort of basic attempt to try to find something to do with returning veterans when they came back from world war ii, why dont we send them to college and see how that works out . A nation that decided to fight the cold war by providing billions upon billions of dollars to Research Universities in order to conduct the research necessary to compete with the soviet union. So my argument is that that wave of money and enrollments and good fortune overwhelmed whatever internal contradictions might have been there all along and that were really only now in a time where in some ways those historical moments of good luck have receded. And ill add one more. The economy changed around us. So you get to the point in the history of american Higher Education in the 60s and 70s, there was a lot of social dissatisfaction with the institution, some real doubts inside the academy about whether the institution would continue. There was a very famous book published in the early 1970s called the overeducated american where a harvard economist predicted we were producing too many College Graduates, and we would we were about to enter a period in which their wages would decline. Well, of course, exactly the opposite thing happened after that, because we were then in the midst of deindustrialization and globalization. And the transition from a society where deunionization, a transition from a society where you could earn a middle income with just a High School Diploma to the world we live in now where you certainly cant. And the only way you can have a fighting chance in the American Economy is to have some kind of postsecondary credential, and the only organizations that are allowed to issue those credentials are the only organizations that are allowed to access public subsidies, are colleges and universities as weve known them for a long time. So i feel that the flaws have been there for a long time but the consequences and the stakes are much higher now than theyve ever been before. And those same internal contradictions that really weighted the anticipations and the attentions and the culture of the university against undergraduate learning which is borne out in most of the research that we have around how much students learn in college i think a lot of us are familiar with very interesting work of sociology academically adrift came out a few years ago. The newest members from the oecd that compare the just sort of foundational math and reading skills of the average American College graduate to the average College Graduate in other countries including, i should say, other countries that graduate more people from college than us, not less and finds the average American College graduate doesnt look very good compared to his or her peers in other countries. All that, i would argue, is at root a function of that confusion and a confusion that causes institutions to not take their essential mission to provide rigor and coherence and attention to their undergraduator Educational Mission as seriously as they ought to. So this is the point in the book where Information Technology kind of intersects with these longterm trends. And rest of it really is talking about how things have changed in Information Technology how there are all kinds of things that are possible now that were not possible even a few years ago. You know, i acknowledge that by talking about this i join a long and kind of ignoble roster of people who have predicted that every new kind of Information Technology would surely overthrow the college as we know it. Thomas edison said that high schools would become obsolete because we would just show students movies a long time ago, and he turned out not to be right about that. But i believe fundamentally that this time is different. I think the kinds of information the Information Technology environment were many now is very, very different than when the best we could do was have college on the radio or college over cable television, that the nature of interactivity, that the computational power, that the9mr ability to create authentic human communities in a combination of a virtual space and a real space is much much, much different than it used to be. So we both have the opportunity to create learning environments that are actually substantially better than some of the learning environments that Students Experience now and ill sort of pause for a moment and urge everyone as we talk about the nature of learning to keep in mind the large distinction between the consensus view of what the best learning environment is and what the learning environment that most College Students actually experience in most of our institutions. I would argue that there is a large distance between the two of them. So if were going to think about whats possible in the future we cant say well, this that or the other vision of technologyenabled education could never be good as few memory of my one great class that i had in college. Because we tend to remember the one great class we had many college, and we tend to not remember the very many unmemorable education experiences that we had. And often really it was much more of the latter than the former. And then the other thing that we need to think about is just the basic issue of how not only can we do better educationally in some cases, we can do the same for many more people for a lot less money. And thats important. We cannot ignore the economics of high or education in all of this Higher Education in all of this. As part of the book, i took a mook, a word i think everyone became instantly tired of hearing a few years ago something that went through the classic kind of cycle of overpraise and then disappointment but which, nonetheless, i believe represents a very, very important and Ongoing Development in american Higher Education. So mostly as kind of a narrative device, if you read the book and i hope you will. I took an entire mit genetics class through the edex platform. I dont represent my learning experience as representing any other than myself. Learners are different in many many, many different ways. What i think is noteworthy about the fact that i took this mit genetics class is the one thing im sure of is that my experience was in no important way different than the experience of the students who were taking the same class in cambridge, massachusetts. Its a very kind of straightforward approach to pedagogy that they use for these introductory classes at mit which is, of course, one of many approaches but not exactly uncommon one. It was a lecturebased class a very good welcometure 6 good lecturebased class. Good lectures can be really good. True nonetheless. This was a lecture that was taught by a man named eric lander who helped lead the human genome project in the 1990s. Hes been teaching introductory biology which is introduction to genetics class for going on 20 years. Hes as updated in the field as possible to be changes the class every year because genetics changes every year. So 100 students real freshman at mit took this class. They taped all the lectures and then about two weeks later, tens of thousands of people around the world including myself watched the same lectures did exactly the same problem sets, did exactly the same homework assignments, took the same exams. I actually went up the cambridge to see the class in person. I was kind of curious is there something im missing by not being there . I interviewed a bunch of the students afterwards to get a sense how they took the class. I interviewed eric lander and some of the teaching assistants. I really wanted to be sure i was right about this and what they all told me was the same thing. They said look this class i went to the lectures. I went back, i talked to some of my fellow students which i could easily do in on line forums they had at edex set up i worked very hard on the sets, and i took the exams. Thats how they teach that class at mit. And you can replicate that, essentially, perfectly at a marginal cost to the last student or nothing. Probably costs them a couple hundred thousand dollars to produce the class quoteunquote. They put it out there and now anyone can take it for free. The combination, i think, of the fact that we can reach so many more people for so much less money and in certain elements but certain important elements of Higher Education the fact that the reach of Information Technology continues to expand the fact that we can predict confidently that these smart people in places like stanford and Carnegie Mellon who have been trying very hard to put together neuroscience and cognitive psychology and Artificial Intelligence into really serious attempts to make the experience of learning in a technologyenabled environment much, much more than what i did which was just watch lecture videos and solve problems. We can predict with confidence that certain kinds of trends are going to continue in certain kind of directions. More people will have access to better technology. Our use of technology educationally is going to continue to improve. The genie is out of the bottle in terms of the best, quoteunquote or most prestigious is probably more accurate American Colleges and universities putting their good name behind these kinds of educational experiences. And when you put that together, thats what you put all those things together, and thats what produces what i characterize in the book as the university of everywhere. Heres what i mean by that specifically. I have a daughter, hes four and a half, shes about to turn five. And the question that sort of animated me when i wrote the book was what will college be like when she turns 18 . Will it be pretty much just the same it was when i turned 18, or will it be something substantially different . And i, in the end, came down on the substantially differe