Wall Street Journal: Nov 11, 2025. Higher Ed Needs Receivership, Not Ref...

The Decline and Fall of a Mighty University: An improbable fiction

Finding a Career: Three other difficult cases

If All Public Colleges Were Free? A thought experiment

Higher Education without Colleges: A thought experiment

A Student Talks Honestly with a Professor

Undergraduate Education Reinvented

Undergraduate education is beyond fixing. In my PsychologyToday.com article today, I make that case and propose an alternative for undergraduate education's reinvention.

Is Higher Education America's Most Overrated Product?

I was interviewed today to discuss the question, "Is Higher Education America's Most Overrated Product?" Here is the link:

Multiple Intelligence, Higher Education Reform, and Ethics

It’s comforting to think that our intelligence isn’t reducible to a single number. Indeed, especially in education circles, the theory of multiple intelligences is widely embraced. 

In today’s PsychologyToday.com The Eminents interview, I spoke with that theory’s creator, Howard Gardner. We spoke not only about that but about his current work examining U.S. higher education and ethical issues in the professions, including psychology.

Marty Nemko's 50 YouTube videos: career advice, education reform, piano playing, and why he likes Christmas

On YouTube, I've posted more than 50 videos. Here are some of the titles:

Lessons From My Failures
How I Write My Columns
Developing Drive
Reinventions: Our Political Campaigns
Reinventions: K-12 Education
Reinventions: Undergraduate education
Reinventions: Climate Change
Six Ways to Meet Bright and Gifted Kids' Needs
An Emotional Plea for Government to Require Colleges to Post a College Report Card
Why We Need a White House Council on Boys and Men
Keys to a Better Talk on Intelligence
Finding Your Career
A Seven-Fingered Pianist
A Very Short Course in How to Play the Piano By Ear
Venus and Iris: A children's story but not really
Big, Black and Shy (the show I co-wrote and piano-accompany)
Why this Jew by birth, atheist by practice, likes Christmas.

 HERE's the link to my YouTube channel.

Making Colleges Accountable: College Scorecard Version 2.0

I continue to try to make the case for requiring college to post a substantive report card on themselves as a condition of receiving federal financial aid. Today, I make that point in the San Francisco Chronicle's Sunday Magazine, Insight.

The article also includes seven questions you should ask a college or graduate admission person before agreeing to attend.

The College Report Card--picked as one of "100 Great Ideas for Higher Education"

I am honored that the National Association of Scholars chose to include, in its 100 Great Ideas for Higher Education, my proposal that all colleges be required to, on its homepage, post a substantive report card on itself, what I call the College Report Card.

It is far more more helpful than, for example, the College Scorecard President Obama announced in his State of the Union address.

I describe the College Report Card in the  Washington Post, and in The Atlantic, the latter which was republished on Stanford's blog on higher education reform.

Not only would a College Report Card enable prospective students to more wisely and easily select a college, that transparency would exert real pressure on colleges to finally treat students as the treasure they are rather than a mere "cost center."

Today, 'four-year" colleges behave as irresponsibly as the researchers who ran the The Tuskegee Experiments. Every year, colleges recruit hundreds of thousands of weak students without disclosing to them that 3/4 such students don''t graduate even if given 8 years, meanwhile having accrued a fortune in debt, little learning, a non-stop assault to their self-esteem, no more employability than they could have had straight out of high school and, critically, the opportunity cost: They could have likely learned far more and become far more employable had they pursued an apprenticeship, the millitary, working at the elbow of an entrepreneur, or taken a short career-prep program at a community college.

It is time to stop giving higher education a free pass. We require every tire, every packaged food, every drug, to provide substantive consumer information. We should require no less of colleges.

I need your help: Any ideas on how to get my ideas implemented?

I am frustrated that my ideas have not been implemented, for example, my ideas on how to improve education, a field in which I have solid bonafides.

For years now, I've done everything I can think of to get those ideas implemented. I have presented them in my columns and articles in The Atlantic and Washington Post as well as on this blog, Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn. I'm spoken about them in public forums, including at The Commonwealth Club, at my alma mater U.C. Berkeley, and on my NPR-San Francisco radio show.  I've sent them to many people with the power to implement them--for example, the biggies at the U.S. Office of Education.. I've written about them in my new book, What's the Big Idea? 39 Reinventions for a Better America.

I believe these ideas have greater potential for improving education than the traditionally proposed reduce class size, increase expectations, etc.:

• Having teachers replace some homework with dream-team-taught online courses. No traction.
• Requiring each college to post substantive consumer information about itself on its home page as a condition for receiving federal funds. No traction.
• Replacing colleges' arcana-larded general education with courses more likely to abet students' lives.  No traction.

Are my ideas simply unworthy? If not, do you have any suggestions as to how I might do a better job of getting them implemented?

America's Most Overrated Product: Higher Education. A Redux

A friend, Scott Lubbock, sent me one of many notes I've received that describe college graduates's unemployability. (Not to mention the half that drop out.)

He writes of his college-graduate son: "He's not much more employable beyond the restaurant work he has done the past five years."  Scott included a June 2012, Harper's column excoriating colleges.

I responded with this:

Beyond the dollar cost, one of higher ed's enormous underconsidered costs is the opportunity cost: what your son could have been doing with his time if he wasn't at college being taught and not remembering endless arcana in that four-to-six-year-long summer camp we call college. 

Then there's the decrement to self-esteem that accrues from not understanding significant percentages of what those brilliant esoterica-obsessed, often poor-communicating professors teach.

Yes, I agree with much of the Harper's article but it downplays how the government's continuing to raise the amount of taxpayer-funded financial aid encourages colleges to raise tuition more. Colleges think, "Ooh good, the government is providing more financial aid, so now we can raise tuition more."  If government provided no aid, colleges would be forced to reduce their prices because far fewer than the 70% of high school graduates who now attend college could afford to pay their sticker price. Can anyone reasonably think it requires anywhere near $100,000 of student money to educate a student for four years at U of O on top of the enormous taxpayer-paid subsidies that it gives to public universities? Could it cost anywhere near $250,000 that brand-name private colleges charge a student? (And private colleges too receive tremendous amounts of government financial aid.)

Higher ed is business at its worst--a horribly overpriced product providing remarkably little value other than the piece of paper, with unconscionably little and usually hidden information on total four- and six-year charges, let alone how little students actually benefit in learning and employability. 

I do like the article's only slightly tongue-in-cheek summary of the conservatives' view of higher ed:

 College is a gilded re-education camp, where innocent children of the entrepreneurial class are turned into brainwashed Maoist cadres, chanting slogans and grinding away the hours in a sexual frolic. The university's scholarly departments they believe are filled with political extremists; its graduates are snobs; its concern with diversity is a form of censorship; its scientists tell lies to further the "global warming" power grab.

The best antidotes to higher education's robbing and damaging our children, our future, would be to educate the high school counselors about alternatives to that ripoff, yes ripoff, we call college, and to force colleges to provide consumer information, just as we require food to contain nutritional information and tires to bear a report card in its sidewall.

Indeed, I strongly advocate colleges continuing to receive our taxpayer-paid largesse only if they post on their home page a consumerist College Report Card that would shine a light on how much people actually pay for how little. One of my TheAtlantic.com columns makes that case. Click HERE to read it.

An Emotional Plea for Colleges to be Honest with Prospective Students: The College Report Card

I seem to have gotten nowhere with a rational approach, so here is a more emotional appeal for you to demand that colleges replace their deceptive marketing practices with a College Report Card. It wouldn't seem that this would be so important but it would dramatically improve the lives of literally millions of people and help America slow its descent into being a third-world country.

Below the video, I provide a transcript of it.

Transcript of the video

An Emotional Plea for Colleges to be Honest with Prospective Students

by Marty Nemko

Among my saddest moments as a career counselor is when I hear a story like this, “I wasn’t a good student in high school but I wanted to prove that I could get a college diploma --I’d be the first one in my family to do it. But it’s been five years and $80,000 and I still have 45 units to go.”

I have a hard time telling such people the killer statistic: According to the U.S. Department of Education, despite colleges having dumbed-down classes to accommodate to the weak students, among college freshmen who graduated in the bottom 40 percent of their high school class, more than three of four won’t earn a diploma, even if given 8 1/2 years! Yet colleges admit and take the money from hundreds of thousands of such students each year!

Even worse, most of those college dropouts leave college having learned little of value. And I urge you, before you trust me on this, see the frightening results of the definitive national study, Academically Adrift--Google it,) a mountain of debt, and devastated self-esteem from all their unsuccessful struggles at college.

Perhaps worst of all, the aforementioned people too rarely end up with a career that requires a college degree. So it’s not surprising that when you hop into a cab or walk into a restaurant, you’re likely to meet workers who spent years and their family’s life savings, mortgaged their family's future, on college only to end up with a job they could have done as a high school dropout.

Colleges trumpet the statistic that, over their lifetimes, college graduates earn more than non-graduates, but that’s terribly misleading:

• For one, you could lock the college-bound in a closet for four years and they’d earn more than the pool of non-college-bound--They’re brighter, they're more motivated; they have better family connections.
• What also makes that million-dollar statistic misleading is that statistic is retrospective. Yes, in past, when a far lower percentage of high school students went to college, college grads had a big advantage in the job market. But today, when colleges admit nearly any student who breathes, that advantage is far smaller. Now we have an oversupply of college graduates at the same time as employers are automating as many jobs as possible, offshoring as many jobs as possible, turning as many jobs as possible to part-time or temp jobs, to beat the enormous cost of hiring U.S. workers.
• At the same time, the cost of college increases well beyond the cost of inflation and the average-time-to degree increases. The calculus is particularly bad for students with a less-than-stellar record in high school.

There is a desperate need for government to mandate a College Report Card, so prospective students and their families could see--for students with their high school records--their likelihood of graduating, the average amount of learning such students accrue, and the likelihood they'll be professionally employed if they defy the odds and graduate.

Public outcry is the only way we can get colleges to change and for the government to mandate that colleges prominent post on their website an externally audited report card on themselves. So please forward this video to your contacts, especially to college-bound students and to their families, and to any legislators you know.

For much more on the need for a college report card, see my blog: http://martynemko.blogspot.com.

The College Report Card: An Animated Fairy Tale

I continue to experiment with ways to get my College Report Card idea to go viral. This time, it's an animation.

I'm convinced that, while simple, government requiring all colleges to post an externally audited report card on themselves is, arguably, the most potent yet practical way yet proposed to get colleges to dramatically improve the quality of higher education.

And of course, if all colleges posted a College Report Card, it would help prospective students to more wisely choose a college or graduate or to decide that a non-school option may be wiser.

I created this animation using a website, Xtranormal.com, that makes it remarkably easy to convert your text into animation. I did it in 20 minutes. I don't find that the animation adds sufficiently to the text but I thought it was worth sharing with you. A transcript of this 3-minute animation appears below.

TRANSCRIPT

There once was a young man, and he was admitted to a college. And he liked the college. He sang the song he had so often heard: "American higher education is a national treasure."

But decades passed and the man learned that his college had changed. The buildings were now fancier but instead of college costing what nearly anyone could afford, now everyone except rich people has to take out big loans. Really big loans.

And now, the college admits many weak students along with the good ones so the classes have to be dumbed-down. And so students learn much less. Despite the dumbing-down, most of the college's students, really most, 55%, dropped out. Even many who graduate, deeply in debt, can find only a job they could have done without college. And most dispiriting to the man, most of the students learn little--the tests show that half of them read, wrote, and reasoned no better than when they began college. The man didn't believe it at first but after reading the authoritative nationwide study: Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, he had to accept that it was true.

And the man was sad. He thought and he thought. What could make colleges better? Finally, he had an idea: He asked, "If the government requires each tire to have a "report card" molded into it, if government requires all packaged food to have a "report card" on the package, why doesn't government require all colleges to have a report card posted on its website: how much students learn in reading, writing, thinking, broken down by students' high school record? What percent graduate in four years? After deducting cash financial aid, how much four or five years costs? What percentage of graduates have professional jobs within a year of graduation, broken down by major--sociology majors aren't going to be as employable as computer science majors.

Having all colleges post a College Report Card would help students choose a good college. More important, it would embarrass the colleges into improving their poor quality of education: Instead of hiring professors based mainly on how many research dollars they can bring in, they'd hire professors because they were great at educating and inspiring students. Instead of spending on fat administrations and fancy buildings and shrubs, they'd spend on providing mentors and coaches to students.

And so the man went to Congress to try to get a law passed requiring colleges to prominently post a report card on themselves, with companies like Price Waterhouse coming in to audit them to avoid cheating. But that scared the colleges, so their very powerful lobby squashed the man--or at least his idea.

And so now, everyone continues to sing: "American higher education is a national treasure." And everyone is living happily ever after. But not really.

The College Report Card: Making Colleges More Transparent and Accountable

Here is a video--with lots of visuals with supporting data and photos--in which I make the case for colleges to be required to prominently post on its website an externally audited report card on itself.

Such a College Report Card would help students choose a college more wisely. Even more important, it would pressure colleges to finally add sufficient value for the enormous time and money that a college or graduate degree demands.

Below the video is a transcript of it as well as links to my other recent writings about The College Report Card, including a version for students and parents to use in selecting a college.

It's very difficult to choose a college wisely.

And it's not surprising. We require tires to have "report card" grades molded into their sidewalls. We require packaged foods to prominently list their calories, fat, even vitamins and minerals. Yet, colleges, one of our most important and expensive purchases are required to prominently post nothing on their websites.

So colleges just hire marketing firms to manipulate students into choosing their college based on such things as deceptive pictures, for example, pointing out the prettiest part of campus. It will not point out, for example, that the weather is bone-chilling miserable half the year or that the campus crime rate is terrible. At Tulane, despite all the pretty pictures on the website, there were three rapes, 30 burglaries, 193 cases of larceny--in just one school year.

Or the pretty pictures somehow don't include, for example, a picture of the mice and rats in Georgetown dorms, which I first heard about decades ago and recently in College Prowler, which posts student reviews said, "Often you will find rats. There are lots of rats."

The colleges post photos on their websites of small, personalized classes taught by an inspired professor and deeply engaged students, even on campuses where most of a student's time is spent in large lectures, or with boring professors.

Colleges post pictures of an engaged student peering into a test tube, which implies that many undergraduates are intimately involved in important research, when in fact only a small percentage are and even if they are, it's usually of little or no benefit to their development let alone their career.

Of course, nearly all college websites include a shot of happy graduates. But few colleges reveal the fact that most students don't graduate even if they take six years. Most students!

And in the coup de gras, the colleges post pictures that suggest that a degree from their school is the key to a great job. In fact, almost half of students are not working or with jobs that don't require a college degree.

Colleges love to trumpet the grossly misleading statistic that college graduates earn a million dollars more over their lifetime. Why misleading? It would take a long time to fully explain, but I'll just quickly say here that that data looks backward not forward--today we have an oversupply of college students. Second, the pool of college graduates is very different in ability, motivation and connections than the pool of non-graduates, so you could have locked the graduates in a closet for four years and they'd have earned more money. And indeed, they wouldn't be locked in a closet, they'd be learning on the job, making connections. Don't fall for deceptive statistics marketed by colleges and repeated in the media.

More basic, on most colleges' sites, it's hard to even find out the total cost of four years: assuming you graduate in four years. (I showed U.S.C.'s financial aid page.) No cost listing. Where's the sticker price?! Note their again deceiving with statistics: "60% of students at USC receive some type of financial assistance." How much? Where, based on your family's income and assets is an estimate of how much financial aid you'll get--not loan, the cash aid! Not just in year one, where they may give you a bigger discount to get you in the door, like the drug dealer who gives you the first dose of crack free or cheap to get you hooked and then jacks up the price.

And indeed, graduates and dropouts alike are terribly weighed down in student debt at the same time as the glut of college graduates has resulted in nearly half of them unemployed or doing jobs they could have done with a mere high school diploma.

It's particularly important to report the true cost of a college education with report after report showing how little value students actually get from higher education. Here, I include shots of articles excoriating higher education in New York magazine, the LA Times, New York Times, CNN.com, the Wall Street Journal, and books: Crisis on Campus (Knopf), The Five-Year Party, No Sucker Left Behind, University Inc, Higher Education?: How colleges are wasting our money and failing our kids.

Among the most scathing books is Academically Adrift, the 2011 authoritative report from the University of Chicago that found that nationwide, students grow frighteningly little even if they defy the odds and graduate: 45% grew not at all in the first two years. 36% not at all from freshman to senior!

Again, may I remind you how many even of the graduates are unemployed and countless more underemployed? Nearly half!

It's time for government to mandate that each college issue an externally audited Report Card on itself. It should include:

• The full projected four-year cost of attendance (subtracting cash financial aid), disaggregated by family income and assets.
• Freshman-to-senior growth in reading, critical thinking, etc., disaggregated by student’s high school record.
• 4- and 6-year graduation rates, disaggregated by student’s high school record.
• The results of a student satisfaction survey
• The summary of the accreditation visiting team report.
• The % of graduates who are professionally employed within one year of graduation, broken down by major.

Of course, such a College Report Card would empower students to choose their college wisely or even to decide that, for that person, a wiser choice would be a short program at a community college for example in robotics repair or cheffing, the military, or on-the-job training, for example, at the elbow of a journeyman electrician or an ethical and successful small business owner.

Bringing transparency to how much value-added a college provides for all the time, money, and opportunity cost would bring another important benefit: It would pressure colleges that add too little value for all that time and money, which according to the research, is MOST colleges, to improve. (Currently, colleges experience no such pressure.

Mandating a College Report Card would help colleges become the national treasure they claim they are, help our students to get an education that will make them more thoughtful human beings, better citizens, and more employable. That, in turn, would help America remain vibrant in our ever tougher global economy.

* * * * *

HERE is a link to a four-page proposal for a College Report Card.

And HERE is a link to a College Report Card that students and families might use to help pick a college.

Higher Education's Marketing Army Launches Counterattack

I knew it couldn't be long before the higher education marketing army started to counterattack the media's recent, powerful excoriations of colleges for the horrendously low value they provide.

Higher education's first major salvo is a study reported in the New York Times, authored by Anthony Carnevale (pictured right,) one of higher education's long-standing insiders and apologists. He argues, deceptively, for higher education's value while skirting inconvenient truths about the hundreds of thousands of weak students admitted to so-called four-year colleges.

As I've reported previously (probably ad nauseam at this point--here's a link to an NPR interview and article,) most such students don't graduate even if they're given eight years. And because of the elitist, real-world-irrelevant arcana so heavily taught in higher education, even many students who graduate grow nearly not at all in reading, writing, critical thinking, mathematical reasoning, etc., nor become employed in a job they wouldn't be qualified for without college. And of course, there's the opportunity costs: what the students could have been doing if they hadn't been spending the enormous sums of money, time, and assaults to their self-esteem in college, for example, in an apprenticeship program or learning entrepreneurship at the elbow of a successful and ethical entrepreneur.

As I've also written previously, the federal government should mandate that all colleges prominently post an externally audited report card on themselves disclosing key information that prospective students can use to decide whether a college, indeed any college, is--given their high school record--the wisest post-high-school choice. And of course, colleges' being forced to report their shockingly bad product would pressure them to improve and perhaps become the national treasure that the higher education marketing machine has led us to believe it is.

Reinventions: Undergraduate Education

Here's a video of my six-point plan for reinventing undergraduate education.

For those who'd rather just read the transcript of the video, it appears below.

REINVENTIONS
Undergraduate Education
by Marty Nemko
(transcript of the above video)

In this video, I present my proposal for how to reinvent higher education. From Time to the New York Times, higher education is finally being called to task for its ever worsening value added. Students and families spend fortunes and so many don't graduate. A major study out of the University of Chicago, Academically Adrift, found that almost half of those who graduate grow so little in writing, reading, critical thinking and so on. So many of those students are able to only find a job they could have gotten without college. But these criticisms of higher ed ar e usually accompanied by only the vaguest or palliative of suggestions for improvement. Here, I present a six-point plan for higher education's reinvention:

1. Colleges should be required to post a Report Card on itself. If each car tire is required to mold its treadline, temperature, and traction rates into its sidewall, should not colleges, one of our largest and most important purchases be required to post their graduation rates and learning growth amounts, broken down by student high school record? Shouldn't colleges be required to report the percentage of graduates within each major who are professionallly employed within a year of graduation? A substantive college report card prominent posted would enable students, counselors and families not only to pick the right college but to decide, if for that student, a wiser path might be a community college, an apprenticeship, a military, or on-the-job training, for example, learning how to run your own business at the elbow of a successful and ethical entrepreneur. After all, according to the U.S. Dept of Education, of the 200,000 students that so-called four year colleges admit each year, fewer than 1 in four graduate even if given 8 1/2 years. And of those who graduate, most do so with a very low GPA in a major unlikely to excite many employers, for example, sociology, physical education, or art rather than computer science, accounting, or engineering. A College Report Card is the least we can do--ensure informed consent for the consumer.

2. There should be two categories of professors: teaching professors and research professors. Universities find it more economical to have their professors do both, but the skills and interests required to teach the typical undergraduate are orthogonal to, the opposite of what's required to do publishable research. Teaching faculty should be selected and promoted on how well they can be transformative, inspirational instructors of undergraduates , not how well they can write a research proposal on the arcana that gets funded, of interest mainly to a few dozen other theoretically oriented PhDs.

3. All existing teaching faculty should be required to successfully complete a teaching bootcamp, consisting in part of master instructors videoing each participant teaching and providing individualized feedback. Any teaching faculty member who subsequently has a year of average student evaluations below a 4 on a 5 point scale should be required to successfully complete a remedial teaching bootcamp.

4 General education courses are the 10 to 15 courses that most colleges require to help ensure a well-rounded education, but which most students view as "courses to get out of the way." While it's true that life should be informed by the wisdom embeddeed in typical general educartion courses such as philosophy and literature, in fact, most young people simply cannot be convinced of that, so poor attendance, cheating, inattention, and minimal learning is more the norm than the exception. Rather than going through the motions, realism dictates that we revise the general education curriculum to focus more on issues of more immediate concern to the vast majority of undergraduates: public speaking, financial literacy, practical problem solving, entrepreneurship, practical ethics, interpersonal communication, career-finding and job-landing, etc.

5. Use Dream-Team-Taught courses. Especially for widely taught and difficult courses such as calculus and organic chemstry, the U.S. Dept of Education should fund development of highly-interactive, immersive courses team-taught on video, disseminated online by a dream team of the nation's finest instructors. The courses would be made available free to all colleges. This would save the colleges money, enabling them, hopefully, to lower tuition, and more important would ensure that all students from the most poorly funded college to Harvard would receive world-class instructor. A university could elect to provide a professor or teaching assistant on site to provide the personal touch or allow students to complete the dream-team-taught courses at home, thereby saving the need for classroom buildings and/or allowing colleges to serve more students with minimal additional expense.

6. the notion of the traditional country-club-like campus is obsolte. Not only does it contribute to enormous cost, it is to the green values espoused on most universities. I believe that most campuses could be shrunk by 80% with little or no loss in quality of experience, perhaps even a gain. In addition to the aforementioned dream-team-taught courses, which students could complete at home, in-person classes could be taught in professors' homes that sit vacant while professors trek to campus, try to find parking spots on campus, etc. Instead of building expensive swimming pools, big, expensive shrub-filled campuses, utlize pools at with local community centers, hotels, and so on. Campuses could be quite compact, consisting of just a streamlined administration building to accommodate a streamlined administration, a student activities building for student club meetings, concerts, and so on, and a reduced number of classroom buildings.

To summarize, the six points in my plan to reinvent higher education are: 1. Require all colleges to prominently post a College Report Card. 2. Have separate faculty for teaching and for research. 3. Require all faculty to successfully complete a teaching bootcamp. 4. Revise general education courses to reflect the content that most undergraduates are open to learning. 5. Use Dream-team-taught courses: Courses taught on interactive video, disseminated online by a dream-team of the nation's finest instructors, with an in-person teaching assistant locally to provide the human touch. 5. Streamline the enormously costly country-club campuses, which would enable colleges to cut student costs of attending dramatically. That's my reinvention of higher education. Thanks for watching. I'm Marty Nemko.

My Most Frustrated Post on How to Reinvent Higher Education

The Atlantic, to its credit, is being a pit bull in not letting higher education continue to get away with the terrible education it provides. The latest is an article calling for "genius" professors to make their courses available online, a la what MIT and Yale have done.

But that would be merely a drop of water in what could be an oceanic change. After reading the article on The Atlantic's website, I posted this as a comment. Forgive the frustrated and know-it-all tone but I decided to allow myself the luxury of letting 'er rip:

THE answer is to, for a given course, say Intro to Economics:

1. Assemble a team NOT of the great genius professors but those MOST TRANSFORMATIONAL TO UNDERGRADUATES.

2. Have them divide the course into the segments each best teaches.

3. Have a genius in online instructional design work with each professor to develop their segment to maximize INTERACTIVITY, SIMULATION, and other wonders possible online.

4. The resulting course would be SOLD to individual universities to offer to their students.

I've written about this so many times for DECADES, most recently:http://www.martynemko.com/arti... Yet, the world has virtually been silent to my call.

Now I'm getting old and I fear that this true reinvention of higher education will not occur. We will continue to be so, so, so incremental. Only a fool would argue that the method of teaching, virtually unchanged in 2,000 years, will change because Joel Klein, Peter Thiel, Richard Vedder, and a few other outsiders decry it.

It's a political problem--There is TREMENDOUS vested interest in maintaining the status quo--the research-oriented professoriate and administrations who LOVE being allowed to get away with research-first professors teaching undergraduates cheaply, and of course, that's reinforced by the mammothly powerful higher education lobby. Higher education lobbying machines litter the halls of our government.

I sure hope I'm wrong. Truly, the world's future could be dramatically improved through higher education's reinvention along the lines I propose.