“It’s cool to be a drop out these days.“ ... “It’s the dying companies that value college degrees. You have to think beyond that piece of paper.”

-> A College Education on the Cheap? Tech Start-Ups Take on Higher Ed is a short read from CNBC.com. The reporter speaks with Sebastian Thrun of Udacity (formerly of Stanford) and Eren Bali of Udemy. Toward the end of the interview, Thrun makes the point that—education aside—what these large, freely offered MOOC-type course offerings may do really well is act as a search engine for intellectual and creative talent that might otherwise never have a chance to be recognized:

“It’s not necessarily about educating, but discovering,” Thrun says, “We can reach and then develop talent that most universities cannot.”

Hmm. MITx may well be MIT’s way of doing the same thing. What do you think? 

Related opportunity. Note that the theme of the January–March 2013 issue of Planning for Higher Education will be Change-Disruption. If you know of someone who could write credibly about these topics throughout a campus’ integrated planning processes, or from a unique perspective, please suggest authors to Planning’s managing editor, claire.turcotte@scup.org. We’ll be looking for articles, planning stories, bloggers, and more. Insights as to what these MOOCs and new for-profit enterprises might do to our planning environment are welcome.

Question. What are the main obstacles standing in the way of an entirely a entirely affordable, accessible, high-quality, and open world of higher education? Are they technological, social, matters of government policy or the conduct and structure of institutions?

Answer. Tradition dies hard. Once you establish a hierarchy of what counts as the pinnacle of excellence (with Oxford and Cambridge in England, Harvard in the U.S., Tokyo University in Japan) it is hard for those who have proted within that system of hierarchy to admit that reputation is not always equal to excellence, that esteem does not necessarily lead to innovation. So institutional resistance, deeply nestled within the class system and reward systems, would top the list. There are also billions of dollars resting in the current system, so there is much resistance to major change.  

 ^{Go directly to the original of the resource described below.}

This video is from 2–3 years ago, ahead of the very real timeliness of this issue. Sandy Shugart is president of Valencia College (formerly Valencia Community College, which name change he refers to in this presentation) and is the Sunday evening plenary speaker at SCUP–47 in Chicago, July 7–11, 2012; higher education's premier planning event. In this video he asks and addresses the question, “Can Our Institutions Accommodate to People Who Don't Believe In Them.” 

Shugart is an accomplished poet and musical artist, as well as the man who recently accepted on Valencia’s behalf, the designation of the Top Community College in the United States. If you just want the talk, skip ahead to about 30 minutes. But you’ll be missing a really good singing performance, with commentary. We very much hope that he brings his guitar to Chicago for SCUP–47.