Students Do Not Live By MOOC Alone

By Peter Lawler. Over the last year or so, I’ve been paying a lot of attention to critics of American higher education. The best ones are from a “disruptive” or libertarian point of view, a kind of libertarianism that’s found in Democratic Silicon Valley as much as among economists and  Republican governors. Those criticisms are all about “bubbles.” There’s the higher educational bubble in cost, which is very similar to the bubble that burst not so long ago in the housing market. Tuitions and total costs are rising much more rapidly than the rate of inflation;  meanwhile, the product, especially in the social sciences and the humanities, is getting increasingly shoddy. More...