"DIY U": The end of university prestige

How the growth of online learning is changing the way we 
think about higher education

By Jed Lipinski

Salon

Higher education in this country is in a state of crisis. 
Nearly nine out of 10 American high school seniors say 
they want to go to college. Yet almost half of U.S. 
college students drop out, outstanding student loan debt 
exceeds $730 billion, and tuition fees rose 248 percent 
between 1990 and 2008, more than any other major commodity 
or service.

As Anya Kamenetz suggests in "DIY U: Edupunks, 
Edupreneurs, and the Coming Transformation of Higher 
Education," these problems, and the fact that students and 
teachers are increasingly venturing beyond campus walls to 
gather and share information, spell trouble for the future 
of the conventional university. In her book, Kamenetz, the 
author of “Generation Debt” and a staff writer for Fast 
Company magazine, argues that a decentralized college 
experience — in which the least effective parts of college 
life are replaced by technology, social media and 
self-directed learning — can limit dropout rates and 
reverse the devastating cost spiral.

Kamenetz doesn’t advocate leaving the university behind, 
but she envisions a future where the 80 percent of 
American college students who attend non-selective schools 
(mainstream public universities and community colleges) 
create their own personalized course of study. Some 
American universities are already making classes available 
for free online, and using blogs, YouTube, Facebook and, 
yes, Twitter, to move toward this new model for higher 
education.

Salon recently spoke with Anya Kamenetz over the phone 
about the origins of our massive student loan debt, her 
own Yale education, and why we should look to England’s 
educational system for guidance.

Why did you decide to write a book about reforming higher 
education?

In 2005 I wrote "Generation Debt," which is about the 
increase in student aid resulting from the growth of 
college classes. I noticed this underlying tendency to try 
to solve the problem by throwing more money at it. But 
it’s like healthcare: Despite the increase in basic costs, 
spending more and more money on it won’t make it more 
affordable for people. Then I started working at Fast 
Company, which operates at the intersection of innovation, 
policy and politics. I began investigating the area of 
higher education as an information industry that was 
possibly ripe for the kind of disruption we’ve seen in 
other information industries.

You argue for a movement toward something called "DIY U." 
What is it?

I define it as the mentality that there’s another way to 
provide the benefits of higher education to the people who 
need it. It’s an idea that puts the learner at the center. 
Rather than the game being, "How do you get into the most 
exclusive institution possible?" the idea is that you as a 
learner are identifying your own goals and assembling 
experiences that will be the most valuable for you to 
achieve those goals.

How did college tuition costs get so out of control?

On a broad policy historical level, what we have now is an 
erosion from the high-water mark of the early 1970s. There 
was a short period of time — from the postwar era with the 
GI Bill to the early '70s — [in which] there seemed to be 
unlimited rounds of investment from the federal government 
and the state into mass higher education. It was seen as 
good economic policy, from a national defense and security 
perspective, and with the Civil Rights Act, there were 
more and more people — women, minorities — who wanted 
access to opportunity. College seemed like a way to allow 
them to prove themselves instead of unleashing them on the 
job market.

Then the economy turned upside down. There was a political 
backlash against college students, fueled in large part by 
the campus unrest in the '60s, and it was no longer so 
popular to support students. So states started withdrawing 
their support, and colleges started practicing cost 
shifting. States came down on colleges as being fat and 
happy and full of liberal professors, and colleges put the 
cost burden on families, and families took on more student 
loans. As a result, you get this credit bubble effect, 
similar to what happened recently with mortgages: There’s 
so much debt available, and so much free money for 
colleges, that parents and families become less sensitive 
to price increases, and there’s no political outcry at the 
state level.

As you write in the book, colleges like Hofstra increased 
their tuition simply to appear more prestigious on the 
U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Right. The problem is, we don’t really know what happens 
inside a college classroom. We have the SAT, which 
measures high school performance more or less, but there 
are no national standards for higher education. So the 
U.S. News & World Report rankings depend on exclusivity 
and spending. Colleges become more prestigious if they 
accept fewer students and spend more money on them, as 
opposed to raising their chances to succeed, improving 
their self-esteem, or making them more efficient.

But competency-based online schools like the Western 
Governors University, which awards degrees based on what 
students have learned, don’t have the same reputation as 
traditional schools like Amherst.

In the future, I don’t think it’ll go back to the old 
model, where colleges have this brand name that everyone 
respects. We still use college as shorthand for prestige, 
but eventually that should be just one marker among many. 
You’re not going to be applying for jobs on the strength 
of your WGU diploma — you’re going to have to rely more on 
your assessments in the field. But grads of WGU have found 
they can satisfy employers by showing them what they’ve 
done, more than where they’ve studied.

Though you attended Yale, a very traditional, very 
prestigious four-year university.

I was very good at traditional school and college, where I 
graduated with honors. All the time while absorbing 
literature and Russian, I was also learning the 
meta-skills of how to please my teachers and how to stay 
away from any classes that might be too challenging or 
outside my comfort zone. I made an attempt to design my 
own major around literature and psycholinguistics, but 
Yale threw up a lot of barriers to that.

My most relevant learning experiences took place outside 
the classroom, editing my student magazine and working as 
an intern at several different publications. Out in the 
real world I was challenged to the max, pulling far more 
all-nighters than I did for my papers. I was always a 
bookworm, so I had to develop new ways of dealing with 
people, whether sources, fellow writers or editors, and 
gathering information from being on the scene. I actually 
cut back on my class load my senior year so I could 
commute to New York three days a week to intern at the 
Village Voice, which is pretty rare among Ivy Leaguers. 
But it turned out great: I found great mentors there, and 
I was writing a column for the Voice just a couple years 
later.

Is there another country we should be modeling our higher 
education after?

There’s no perfect model. Every country in the world is 
grappling with the unprecedented demand for higher 
education. In the developing world, there are 10 or 20 
times as many people who want a degree than there is 
capacity. The developed countries have the same problems 
as we do: The costs are going up, the institutions are 
somewhat calcified and insulated from the job market.

I did, however, keep coming across innovative approaches 
in England. The U.K. is very interesting since it has an 
economy and standard of living similar to ours, but until 
recently, they had a much smaller percentage of people 
going through higher education. Today, they have many more 
entrance points and a highly developed set of vocational 
programs. Up until the age of 25, you can access a variety 
of resources that set you up with apprenticeships and 
internships. England’s Open University, which goes back to 
the 1960s, when they had classes on television, is 
currently a leader in open courseware.

Does open courseware mean we’ll be getting rid of 
professors?

 From the earliest days of the academy, it’s been an ideal 
to share knowledge openly — that scholars aren’t producing 
knowledge primarily for personal gain but to share it with 
the world. And it’s been a decade since MIT started their 
OpenCourseWare project, putting all their courses online 
for free. The biggest advocates of these changes tend to 
be humanities professors and graduate students fascinated 
by the implications of social media, by how people 
communicate in the media world. But it’s important to 
emphasize that these repositories are materials. It’s not 
that by using OpenCourseWare you’re replicating an MIT 
experience. You’re putting the raw material in someone’s 
hands so that, by working alongside peers or a teacher of 
some sort, you can absorb this knowledge. It’s the best 
possible use of the Web.

More and more people are applying to trade schools, where 
they can learn practical skills that won’t be offshored. 
Can students really learn these trades online?

This has been a big question for me, and my major answer 
is hybridization. Vocational schools are actually a good 
example of the hybrid model, because when you’re in the 
classroom you’re actually engaging with your hands. On 
WikiEducator, for example, they have a series of videos on 
chainsaw maintenance. But before you become a chainsaw 
maintainer, you probably want to find a real person who 
knows how to use a chainsaw. Offline and online aren’t 
isolated experiences.

A whole DIY movement — exemplified by sites like Boing 
Boing — comes from people going online to learn about 
something, going offline and trying it out, and then going 
back online to report what they did.

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-- 
Dr Jon Cloke
Lecturer
Geography Department
Loughborough University
Loughborough LE11 3TU

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