George Rebane

[This is the transcript of my regular KVMR commentary broadcast on 31 May 2013.  This and previous commentaries are also available on the KVMR website.]

Information systems professor Larry Press of CalState Dominguez Hills recently asked the question ‘Are poor students excluded from online education?’  In this commentary and on my blog the larger issue of wealth and income inequality has been extensively debated, and continues to be a hot button topic between the Left and the Right.  The Left insists that the problem is correctible through the proper adoption of new and improved social justice policies.  The Right doesn’t agree and offers to lift all fortunes through smaller government, less regulation, and lower taxes.  But it claims no solution to the inequality problem.

Low cost, widely available online education has been promoted for its many benefits, one of which is its availability to broader classes of students that include the poor.  Before we get to the inequality issue, let’s review a little about online education and training.

Most teachers in grade and high schools know that there are several sources where students can learn not only STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) subjects but many others in the soft sciences and even in the liberal arts.  These can be accessed by anyone in the world who can get on the web, and who speaks the instructor’s language.  Everyone should go to one of these sites and take a short lesson to see the promise of such online courses.

Lately private companies like Coursera have developed instructional software systems into which teachers and professors can pour their curriculum for online delivery.  These educational environments do everything from subject matter presentation, remediation, testing student performance, record keeping, and even mentoring with live human beings where needed.  Over 80 universities like University of California, MIT, Stanford, Harvard, etc have started to offer a wide catalog of courses for both fulfillment and credit, often with class sizes in the tens of thousands.

Last week the Georgia Institute of Technology announced that it will offer the entire curriculum for a masters degree in computer science, and upon meeting course requirements Georgia Tech will actually award the Master of Science degree for successful completion, all on line.  Students will be charged around $7,000 for the program, which works out to somewhere between one sixth and one tenth the current cost of attending classes given by a live instructor.  Other universities will quickly follow suit in awarding online degrees.  So we expect that through online interactive technologies, the cost of higher education will be going down in the coming years.

But how will this impact inequality.  Well, more poor students worldwide will have access to the kinds of education that before was out of their reach.  But the poor, many of whom are not able to handle the course materials even if they were free, will not be helped by such courses.  We may be sure that other courses will be designed for delivering workplace skills in cooking, carpentry, plumbing, small engine maintenance and repair, caring for the elderly, etc.  Some of these will even be available on cell phones (see Press), and they will help prepare more of the poor in wallet and wit for many job markets.

However, even with these advances, there is no guarantee that wage and wealth inequality will be reduced.  (see also Schumpeter in The Economist)  In fact, the prognosis is for exactly the opposite.  The added legions of students who will soon master the wealth creating STEM subjects will have the opportunity to soar like eagles in their new professions, and be lifted out of poverty.  But they will be lifted out disproportionately from how the poorer segments of the population will fare.  To be sure, all classes of workers will be aided by online technologies, but necessarily at different rates and to jobs with widely varying pay scales.

So even though everyone’s standard of living will undoubtedly increase with more education that is accessible and cheap, the difference in wages will still depend on what each student or worker brings to the party.  And for good or ill, the boost that students get will continue to depend on their DNA before factors like perseverance and state aid enter the picture.  Since nature and freedom tend to work together like that, the inequality gap can be expected to widen.

My name is Rebane, and I also expand on this and related themes on NCTV and on georgerebane.com where the transcript of this commentary is posted with relevant links, and where such issues are debated extensively.  However my views are not necessarily shared by KVMR.  Thank you for listening.

[1jun13 update]  This update was received from a reader. gjr

State Systems Go MOOC

Universities from New Mexico to New York will join Coursera in a sprawling expansion of the Silicon Valley startup's efforts to take online education to the masses.

Together, state systems and flagship universities in nine states will help the company test new business models and teaching methods and potentially put Coursera in competition with some of the ed tech industry's most established players.

The push, which company and university officials previewed over the past several days, is not a single effort but several pilot projects with different goals. Some university leaders are unsure of the direction they are heading in, but the effort will create at least a temporary buffet of experimentation using Coursera's online platform. A network of universities will be creating or using and buying or selling course material from each other, with Coursera in the middle as a content broker, consultant and host.

Source Inside Ed.  Read more here.