“Harvard sees me as a dollar sign, and not a person,” wrote one student on a petition currently circulating. The university did not respond to requests to comment. (link)
“With a significantly reduced value proposition, you should not be surprised that people will ask for lower fees,” said Andreas Schleicher, director for education and skills at the OECD. “In the long run, the unbundling of educational content, delivery and accreditation through digitalisation will make that inevitable anyway.”
I am no fan of much of what Andreas Schleicher says about education, and the above views have been circulating since at least the mid-1990s. I have been sceptical, and would add many caveats. Now I think I may have been too cautious, and have underestimated how fast the political landscape may change. If he and others turn out to be right, the traditional universities have only themselves to blame. The lower piece of bread of the educational sandwich may well be swallowed whole, but much of the filling is going to go, too. For the record, at least with respect to medicine and some other professional domains, the unbundling existed in the past, and it is not hard to reimagine how things could change back. Possibly for the better, even without the emetic that is Covid.
US universities under pressure to cut fees because of remote learning | Financial Times