[YEDG] July 4 - Higher education Creative destruction & 2 more articles.
Serena Park
http://www.economist.com/node/21605906/print
Higher education
Creative destruction
A cost crisis, changing labour markets and new technology will turn an old institution on its head
Jun 28th 2014 | From the print edition
HIGHER education is one of the great successes of the welfare state. What was once the privilege of a few has become a middle-class entitlement, thanks mainly to government support. Some 3.5m Americans and 5m Europeans will graduate this summer. In the emerging world universities are booming: China has added nearly 30m places in 20 years. Yet the business has changed little since Aristotle taught at the Athenian Lyceum: young students still gather at an appointed time and place to listen to the wisdom of scholars.
Now a revolution has begun (see article), thanks to three forces: rising costs, changing demand and disruptive technology. The result will be the reinvention of the university.
Off campus, online
Higher education suffers from Baumol’s disease—the tendency of costs to soar in labour-intensive sectors with stagnant productivity. Whereas the prices of cars, computers and much else have fallen dramatically, universities, protected by public-sector funding and the premium employers place on degrees, have been able to charge ever more for the same service. For two decades the cost of going to college in America has risen by 1.6 percentage points more than inflation every year.
For most students university remains a great deal; by one count the boost to lifetime income from obtaining a college degree, in net-present-value terms, is as much as $590,000 (seearticle). But for an increasing number of students who have gone deep into debt—especially the 47% in America and 28% in Britain who do not complete their course—it is plainly not value for money. And the state’s willingness to pick up the slack is declining. In America government funding per student fell by 27% between 2007 and 2012, while average tuition fees, adjusted for inflation, rose by 20%. In Britain tuition fees, close to zero two decades ago, can reach £9,000 ($15,000 a year).
The second driver of change is the labour market. In the standard model of higher education, people go to university in their 20s: a degree is an entry ticket to the professional classes. But automation is beginning to have the same effect on white-collar jobs as it has on blue-collar ones. According to a study from Oxford University, 47% of occupations are at risk of being automated in the next few decades. As innovation wipes out some jobs and changes others, people will need to top up their human capital throughout their lives.
By themselves, these two forces would be pushing change. A third—technology—ensures it. The internet, which has turned businesses from newspapers through music to book retailing upside down, will upend higher education. Now the MOOC, or “Massive Open Online Course”, is offering students the chance to listen to star lecturers and get a degree for a fraction of the cost of attending a university.
MOOCs started in 2008; and, as often happens with disruptive technologies, they have so far failed to live up to their promise. Largely because there is no formal system of accreditation, drop-out rates have been high. But this is changing as private investors and existing universities are drawn in. One provider, Coursera, claims over 8m registered users. Though its courses are free, it bagged its first $1m in revenues last year after introducing the option to pay a fee of between $30 and $100 to have course results certified. Another, Udacity, has teamed up with AT&T and Georgia Tech to offer an online master’s degree in computing, at less than a third of the cost of the traditional version. Harvard Business School will soon offer an online “pre-MBA” for $1,500. Starbucks has offered to help pay for its staff to take online degrees with Arizona State University.
MOOCs will disrupt different universities in different ways. Not all will suffer. Oxford and Harvard could benefit. Ambitious people will always want to go to the best universities to meet each other, and the digital economy tends to favour a few large operators. The big names will be able to sell their MOOCs around the world. But mediocre universities may suffer the fate of many newspapers. Were the market for higher education to perform in future as that for newspapers has done over the past decade or two, universities’ revenues would fall by more than half, employment in the industry would drop by nearly 30% and more than 700 institutions would shut their doors. The rest would need to reinvent themselves to survive.
A new term
Like all revolutions, the one taking place in higher education will have victims. Many towns and cities rely on universities. In some ways MOOCs will reinforce inequality both among students (the talented will be much more comfortable than the weaker outside the structured university environment) and among teachers (superstar lecturers will earn a fortune, to the fury of their less charismatic colleagues).
Politicians will inevitably come under pressure to halt this revolution. They should remember that state spending should benefit society as a whole, not protect tenured professors from competition. The reinvention of universities will benefit many more people than it hurts. Students in the rich world will have access to higher education at lower cost and greater convenience. MOOCs’ flexibility appeals to older people who need retraining: edX, another provider, says that the median age of its online students in America is 31. In the emerging world online courses also offer a way for countries like Brazil to leap-frog Western ones and supply higher education much more cheaply (see article). And education has now become a global market: the Massachusetts Institute of Technology discovered Battushig Myanganbayar, a remarkably talented Mongolian teenager, through an online electronics course.
Rather than propping up the old model, governments should make the new one work better. They can do so by backing common standards for accreditation. In Brazil, for instance, students completing courses take a government-run exam. In most Western countries it would likewise make sense to have a single, independent organisation that certifies exams.
Reinventing an ancient institution will not be easy. But it does promise better education for many more people. Rarely have need and opportunity so neatly come together.
From the print edition: Leaders
http://www.economist.com/node/21603910/print
The future of language
Johnson: English against the machine
Jun 11th 2014, 15:38 by R.L.G. | DUBLIN
LAST week’s columnlooked at how machine translation (MT) has—and has not—improved. Free services like Bing and Google Translate can give quick-and-dirty, mostly-correct translations for tourists and the curious most of the time. For professional uses, machine-translated material must be post-edited for both accuracy and style. With restricted subject matter, MT systems can be trained to choose the best translations for words with multiple meanings. This is why (for example) the European Commission uses MT extensively. The legalistic language of the European Union may be impenetrable to outsiders, but the narrow range of bureaucratic language makes translating it much easier.
All this is getting better as computers get faster, storage cheaper and software smarter. But MT has improved only gradually, not in the revolutionary leaps and bounds seen in other fields. It is an example of the truism that machines find it easy to do things humans find hard (vast maths problems), and yet find it hard to do things humans find easy (language, natural movement). (Some experts have already begun pouring cold water over last weekend's reports that a machine has finally passed the artificial-intelligence "Turing Test", for example.)
No one knows how MT will look in 25 years. But that doesn’t stop us from guessing. At the TAUS conference on MT in Dublin last week, Johnson was invited to debate with Nicholas Ostler on the lingua franca of the future. Mr Ostler is a historian of the long sweep of languages’ lives. His most recent book, “The Last Lingua Franca” (reviewed here), laid out the arguments he presented in Dublin. English is actually shrinking, in percentage terms, as a mother tongue. (Other languages’ speakers are having more babies.) And foreign languages associated with dominating groups (first colonial Britain and then hyperpower America, in this case) can stir resentment, so it is not guaranteed that people in the future will always want to learn English.
Meanwhile, Mr Ostler has high hopes for MT. All of that increased computing power should mean that, for the vast majority of the world’s people, the quick-and-dirty translations available from the likes of Google can only get better. In the long run, MT will be a better option for most people than slaving over learning English for years. Most people, after all, spend most of their lives working and living in their native language.
Johnson presented the case for English (a predictive case, not a hoped-for one): English has a reach and penetration unlike any language in history. It is now spoken by twice as many non-natives as natives, increasingly shedding its association with America and Britain. (When a Swede negotiates with a Brazilian taxi driver, or a Hungarian attends a conference in Poland, they are not thinking of American foreign policy when they pragmatically use English.) Schools are introducing English at earlier and earlier levels: Denmark is beginning English in first grade, and Zurich has chosen to teach pupils English before French, the second-biggest language of Switzerland. As much as it may chagrin French-speakers, such decisions are entirely practical and can be expected in ever greater numbers.
The effect of this, Johnson predicts, is that the lock-in English now enjoys will only get stronger. Crucially, English will begin to be taken for granted. Every child will one day get it in school (as every child in China now does). They will hear so much English in early years that acquisition of a decent fluency will be easier and easier. Technology isn’t only helping machine translation. It is giving children around the world television, music and movies in English. Ambitious families will ensure that their kids see as much as possible, as early as possible, so they speak English not just competently, but fluently and comfortably. And those kids will increasingly choose English themselves. It opens up social networks; there’s a lot more on Twitter if you speak English. English even opens up games: youngsters round the world learn English to chat while they play online games like Minecraft and Worlds of Warcraft. This early and frequent exposure to English will mean the effort to learn, which Mr Ostler describes, begins to seem a lot less wearisome. It is simply part of the environment, something that billions of children will know a decent bit of before they even begin their first class. And as they progress up the grades, incentives will kick in, as pupils hear again and again how many doors English will unlock for them. Add to that an ever-strenghtening network effect: the more people who speak English, the more useful it is to speak English. It is hard to see what will stop this momentum in the next few decades.
In the course of Johnson's discussion with Mr Ostler, we agreed on many things, and found a certain synthesis. English is still a language of elites, those well educated or in the kind of well-paid globalised professions that required it. Machine translation has come a long way in the past decade. For many people who are born, live and die without ever leaving their home regions, MT will be good enough for the few times in their lives they need to interact with foreigners. Speech recognition has got a lot better, making slow and carefully enunciated speech decently (if not brilliantly) translatable.
Johnson’s closing, though, was this: MT is improving with written texts, but it has a very long way to go in interpreting speech. As English gains ground, neither speech recognition nor MT will come far enough to replace the loud, unstructured conversations businesspeople have as they hash out deals in a noisy hotel bar. Who is so confident in MT that they would rely on it for a job interview? What about a first date? And, if successful, the subsequent marriage? No one can say when MT will be reilable for interpreting the quick, context-dependent and unstructured mess that is live human speech. A generation, at least—a generation in which English’s incredible penetration around the world will only deepen.
Johnson must confess: he narrowly lost the audience vote. Of course, there need be no single winner: both MT and English clearly have a future. But contests and debates are nonetheless illuminating, not to mention fun. So share your predictions in the comments.