Instead of going into debt to earn a college degree, could we eventually get paid to learn?

So much of what we now recognize as possible and normal would have been hard to imagine just a few years ago. I know people have been saying that for decades, but personally, as a life-long educator, I feel like I am suddenly on the verge of massive change.

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I have very little background in tech, but as a typical working consumer, I have never shied away from new tools. That said,

Steemit is providing the best example of a practical use for blockchain technology that I have yet to experience. I keep hearing naysayers point out the lack of a big app, but its right here and we Steemians know it!

I have been teaching college courses for almost 30 years. I have seen a lot of change in that time, but really, not that much. When I began teaching in 1990, I didn't yet have an email account, and I certainly hadn't used the internet. I did however make the big switch from a word processor to a pc. I was still an undergrad, and procrastinated by playing MS DOS games on a monitor that only displayed letters and numbers, (and I have eerie memories of where those games took me, even though it was only in my mind).

Fast forward, and I now use fairly sophisticated course management software. Canvas is the brand that my college uses today, and for the most part, I have been able to program my classes in advance in ways that have really changed, and even improved, how I teach. One of the many classes I teach is public speaking, and I now grade students in Canvas while they are giving speeches, and they can read my feedback as soon as they get back to their seats. If school shuts down for a weather emergency or public transportation strike we just shift to online and continue without skipping a beat.

I haven't brought a piece of paper to class, or accepted one from a student, in about five years. The only thing I carry around campus is a cup of coffee.

But aside from that sort of technology, nothing has changed in the basic structure of higher education. I teach at a publicly funded, open-access community college (anyone who has a high school diploma or GED is welcome to enroll). The state and city are each supposed to provide one third of our operating budget through taxes, and students are supposed to contribute the other third with tuition. Since the college was founded in 1964 neither the state or the city has ever met their full promise, so tuition has been raised consistently to make the difference. The majority of our students qualify for various forms of financial aid, but that rarely covers 100% of the expense to attend and purchase books. So even though my college is the viable and less costly alternative to four year university, students still have to pay to become educated.

On the other side of the equation, I make a truly remarkable salary as a full-time tenured professor. I teach classes roughly 140 days per year, so I enjoy a tremendous amount of flexibility and even free time. Obviously my job requires much more than 140 days of work, as I am often revising courses, doing research, and programming my course pages, but I have worked very challenging schedules in the retail and hospitality industries (60-80 hour weeks), which is precisely why I ended up as a full-time professor. I make a modest salary. I took my current job knowing I would never get rich. My wife also works in public education and makes slightly more than I do, and together we pay our bills and have enough left over to save for retirement and basically enjoy a lot of simple pleasures. We will likely not have much money saved for our own two children to go to universities, but they will be able to attend my college for free for two years.

This may sound like a reasonable economic scenario, but as I learn more and more about blockchain, and how we can rethink the way we create totally new economic systems, it is beginning to feel more and more whacked, for lack of a better word.

Politicians are saying higher education should be free, which, within the current system sounds, and in some ways, is, completely nuts. I was very happy when Barack Obama voiced strong support for higher education, and specifically community colleges, but I almost screamed out loud when I heard him say that everyone should get a college degree. That is so wrong. Not everyone needs a college degree, and not everyone has the maturity or intellectual capacity to earn one. He set up a lot of people for disappointment, but partly because of the system. Economically, I just can't wrap my head around using taxes to fund high education so that it is free for everyone. Even in my most socialist moments, that just doesn't sound right. You can make it sound right if you falsely elevate the value of higher education, and pretend that everyone is actually motivated to put in the hard work of becoming more educated, but college is not the answer for everyone, therefore it shouldn't be paid for by everyone so that everyone can go. Sorry Bernie. You're cool and all, but dead wrong on this issue.

We need better education all over the place. We need more types of education. We need college, but not for the reasons that most people think. College is the home of liberal arts and higher level technological training, like medical and disease research, molecular biology, chemistry, robotics, AI, etc. But the vast majority of people going to college because it is supposedly necessary to get ahead in life would be much better served by a sophisticated vocational technical program. A traditional four-year college program to become a coder? That's a laugh, but its interesting to think about how colleges all over the world worked for decades to supposedly stay relevant by developing IT programs. College isn't a bad place to learn IT, but its not the only place or the best place.

To be clear, I believe in higher education. I also believe that I was the kind of young person who traditional higher ed served particularly well. I tell my students this in every class I teach: it will never be listed in the catalogue or used in a school's advertising, but the only real value of college is that after two or four years you leave a more sophisticated person than when you entered. By sophisticated I mean you are able to to talk to more different types of people about more different types of subjects. That's it, and it is indeed valuable, more so if you are like me, a dumb punk from a racially homogeneous suburb who seriously needed some higher education. Without the increased sophistication I developed as an undergrad, I never would have had the wherewithal or maturity to make it through graduate school, or any of the careers I engaged in after. But there are plenty of people that don't need that help.

The biggest indication that college is whacked is the staggering debt accrued by people in order to earn degrees. Now, to be real, a lot of that debt is accrued by making really bad choices (Why on earth would someone pay 3-4 times as much to go to two years of university instead of starting at community college? The sad answer is that many, many parents would be too embarrassed to admit such a thing at cocktail parties. Literally.) But it is almost impossible for the large majority of people to get a bachelors degree without accruing some debt, and often some significant debt. We rationalize that debt purely because of the outdated model, and by outdated, I mean outdated by blockchain.

But in their article titled The Blockchain Revolution and Higher Education, Don Tapscott and Alan Tapscott, touch on this subject with a bit of an edge when they explain,

As long as society — or at least today's employers, including governments — values existing credentials, and students will pay to get those credentials at recognized institutions of higher education rather than pursue alternatives, then the college/university will remain a gatekeeper to opportunity.

It is indeed hard to imagine society letting go of the holy credential simply because blockchain presents novel ways of communicating, but they continue with an intriguing idea.

But the credential and even the prestige of a higher education institution are rooted in its effectiveness as a learning institution. If colleges and universities become seen as places where learning is inferior to other models or, worse, as places where learning is restricted and stifled, then the role of the campus experience and the credential itself will be undermined. Attending a college or university is too costly to be simply an extended summer camp.

I personally know parents who are still willing to send their kids to this "extended summer camp" just to preserve their cocktail party vanity. But If we laugh at people who are continuing to waste time making Mark Zuckerberg rich instead of developing a flow of income using Steemit, then we have to start laughing at people who keep buying into traditional higher ed.

In the same article, Tapscott and Tapscott refer to Melanie Swan, an accomplished technology theorist in the Philosophy Department at Purdue University.

[Swan] has been working on MOOC accreditation and “pay for success” models on the blockchain. The blockchain provides three elements toward this goal: (1) a trustable proof-of-truth mechanism to confirm that the students who signed up for Coursera classes actually completed them, took the tests, and mastered the material; (2) a payment mechanism; and (3) smart contracts that could constitute learning plans.

I am in no position to criticize Swan's work, and she is clearly blazing a trail by plotting ways blockchain can support an overhaul of higher ed, but as fa as I can tell she is still focused on a system where students and/or outside donors provide the capital to sustain it. This would probably be necessary to keep the electric running inside all the brick and mortar buildings that make up a college campus, or more important, to pay the salaries of the administrators that run them. Swan's ideas may work to reduce or eliminate student debt as a necessary part of the existing system, but I am beginning to think we are trying to fix a big problem by tweaking an outdated model. But if we completely change our approach, maybe there is a radically different question. I'd like to ask that question here:

Why don't students make money by going to college? Or a more sophisticated way of asking it might be, Why don't people get paid to learn?

If I can make a few cents, or a few hundred dollars, with an upvote on something I posted here on Steemit, and we now easily recognize that Steem has value based on the work put into writing that post, along with the work of people reading it and commenting on it, then why can't the work involved in writing an English 101 essay be just as potentially valuable?

Here is one way I imagine this playing out, even if it seems a bit extreme:

The institution ceases to exist. There are only knowledgeable and/or skilled people and there are people seeking knowledge and skills. As an experienced and knowledgeable public speaker and teacher, I design a course of study and post it online. It can be as simple as a syllabus in a Steemit post, with a chronological list of assignments. Students are free to join the course and complete the assignments, and following the common model, they "pay" for the course by resteeming and upvoting the syllabus post. They "submit" assignments by posting them and linking their posts to the syllabus post, or to weekly follow ups. Assignments can be completed in writing and video, depending on the objective. I then evaluate the student work, and instead of grades, award upvotes. I could award credit as pass/fail, or discriminate between traditional letter grades by increasing or decreasing my vote power. In this way, the entire course can be completed in a set amount of time, and by the end, not only do the students have the knowledge they sought, but they also are more wealthy as a result, as opposed to being in debt.

The current course management software being used at most colleges provides provides a platform for students to interact. Whether I teach a face-to-face or an online class, I set up discussion boards, but they really only have practical value when the students are required to collaborate on a project. Their participation and interaction in the discussion boards is forced by the requirement to produce something, and such work serves a good purpose and plenty of value. But another very valuable form of interaction would be for students to review each others work and provide peer feedback. In order to force this type of interaction, I have created assignments linked to the boards with point values, but only the most motivated and mature students genuinely engage in those assignments. The comments tend to be canned, and it is obvious that most of the students are checking off requirements to earn the points. In fairness, I have to award the credit when the specified task is completed, and not only is it too much trouble to evaluate the genuineness of each comment, but to do so would be too subjective.

But so much of what I just described would completely change with a new model. Most important, we could move away from students enrolling in whole programs of study simply because employers value the credential they lead to. Instead, students would seek the knowledge they need on a course by course basis, and strings of courses could be developed to add scaffolded learning if that's required to achieve a certain end. Once you are rid of the dead weight that exists in most college classrooms, the teacher would be free to focus all her energy on students who actually want the instruction and are ready and willing to work for it. No more taxes or private donations are funding students to take up space when they really don't want to be there, or don't know why they are there. As we move into the actual work of the course, all student interaction would either be required in order to produce results, or voluntary to review each others work, provide peer feedback, and simply engage the learning process together on a deeper level if motivated to do so. And we all know the subtle but powerful influence of the upvote on motivation. If I know that my "classmate" might upvote my feedback, then I am motivated to really look at their work and provide the most insight or support I can muster. If you have played this game at all on Steemit, then you know that sometimes faking it a little actually leads to becoming interested in other people and their ideas.

I honestly do not see this as something that will completely upend traditional higher education. For one thing, the very lucrative corporations that support the college system by providing textbooks, testing software, course management systems and professional development are not going to stop lobbying governments to keep the system in place with public funding. It will take a long time for employers to give up the belief that degrees matter, as opposed to actual knowledge and skill. But I do see the potential for blockchain to provide truly wonderful alternatives. At first it will take the form of formal courses offered to people who simply want to learn for the sake of learning. If that can take hold, and people rave about what they have learned from good teachers, then it might grow into a trend that begins to influence employers to seek out, and evaluate new hires in more sophisticated ways. And all that assumes our workplaces and how we go to work will not change radically very soon.

I also fear much of this. The only reason I feel competent to teach other people today is because I have spent so many years in the practice of teaching, in the safety and security of the current system of higher education. The system provides me with excellent health benefits that make my salary sustainable. If the institutions cease to exist as I have suggested, I don't know how people will be able to grow into excellent teachers.

I am in position to make a credible prediction of what education will look like in the future, but I know we are on the brink of big change.

About me

My name is Craig and I am an assistant professor of communication at Community College of Philadelphia where I have taught for ten years. I have also taught at Southern Illinois University at Carbondale, Seattle Central Community College, Shoreline Community College, La Salle University, Penn State Abington University, Chaminade University, and Delaware County Community College. I am also a track and field coach; I am an assistant coach at my local high school, and my wife and I run a youth track and field club in our town. In addition to my teaching experience, I have over ten years experience in both retail and hospitality management. The combination of my management and education experience have provided me with some good insight into the relationship between college and the workplace. I believe in public education and higher education, and I believe we are on the brink of some needed changes in both.