Why Should I Go to University if Everything’s Online?
Is there anything of value left in the halls?
If you were a university student during the Covid-19 pandemic, forced to attend lectures and classes online (and probably in your pyjamas), you may have at some point asked yourself the question:
‘Why do I go to university, if I don’t actually go to the university?’
Good question.
Of what value to a student is a university, with all its expensive buildings and classrooms and facilities and well-paid educators, if students have limited or no access to those things?
Limited Offer
Universities offer four main things to students:
Content
Someone to explain the content
Somewhere to learn and study the content
And certification that they’ve understood the content
Anyone who has spent enough time on the internet will be very aware of the irrelevancy of having a large institution providing the first two things on that list.
And anyone who had to study through lockdown or who has taken an online course will be aware that the third is a not-always-guaranteed feature of university education.
The last, of course, is much more difficult to substitute. And that’s what most students are usually in it for — there’s a reason why an engineering degree from MIT isn’t the same as one from Bielefeld University, even though the content is basically identical. But I’ll get to that.
What’s the point?
Ostensibly, the whole point of going to university is to learn things — to consume educational content.
But content is not exclusive to universities.
In the past, you couldn’t just browse the internet for millions of detailed books on everything from anthropology to zoology.
But now, if I want to learn something, there are endless content options to suit my needs, and there are endless hours of free lectures online to supplement the material.
Of course, it’s useful to have content curated and packaged by someone who knows what they’re talking about — which is what a university course essentially is — but such packages are also available online on sites like Coursera, Udemyor EdX.
These are also usually free or have free versions, and if you’re paying, then that payment is accompanied by a certificate to prove that you learnt the stuff.
Teachers
While there is a certain quality to having face-to-face lectures where you can ask questions to your learned instructor, that’s only really valuable when that instructor is good — when they’re intelligent, enthusiastic and have good communication skills.
Most academics are employed as researchers first and as educators second. Teaching for some is an obligation.
Universities with weighty endowments can compete for some of the good teaching attributes in their academics, but not all academics who are good teachers are motivated by money.
So, even then richest, most prestigious universities can’t guarantee students that teachers will be good.
Research-focused universities (all the prestigious ones) tend to compete for those academics who have produced significant, impactful research, because that improves their prestige and ranking.
But research acumen guarantees nothing about quality as a teacher.
How spectacular a professor is to their academic field means squat to the undergrads who have to sit through unenthusiastic and incomprehensible lectures.
Access
Either way, as it is with content, you don’t have to attend the right university, or any university, to gain access to the best teachers or to the most influential academics and their research.
There’s little getting in the way of the best lecturers in the world presenting their lectures online.
Indeed, many of the free lectures online are given by some of the best teachers in the world, and some whom not even top-tier universities would be able to get, on account of them being dead.
Also, with online courses, there’s a higher guarantee that the instructors will be some of the best because it’s more lucrative for the course publishers to have some great or famous lecturer presenting while paying them a one-time fee.
This is all accompanied by an industry of popular and accessible books about every imaginable topic written by those at the forefront of research and education.
Those books might not have the technical detail and rigour of a hefty textbook or forty hours of lectures, but unless you intend to become an expert or contribute to research, that level of detail probably isn’t necessary.
Space
Of course, there’s a big different between getting an A-class education in your living room and getting the same education in the classrooms of beautiful old buildings or new high-tech labs and being surrounded by interesting and intelligent people all hopeful and interested and intellectually curious.
Also, for certain disciplines, its practically impossible to learn what needs to be learned through online courses only — chemistry needs chemicals, physics needs lasers and engineering needs everything in between.
And for every other discipline, it can also be difficult to gain access to artefacts or original sources without extensive physical libraries.
Not everything is online.
And sometimes it’s just difficult to find a quiet place in your house to study — the right library nook can be heaven.
Out of everything universities can offer to a student, the quality of their facilities is most directly related to how much money they have.
If you’re a university on a budget you can get students to buy their own textbooks and get good teachers who are happy to work on low salaries because they have other reasons for staying where they are.
But you can’t go down to the discount laser shop and get some half-priced gear for your quantum physics lab.
Money matters with tech. It also matters with the quantity and quality of spaces for teaching and study.
But having money isn’t the same as spending it.
Priorities and Prestige
Because universities make a lot of their money through research grants, and a lot of their reputation by doing important research, it makes sense to spend a lot of their money improving their ability to do more and better research.
This means specialised equipment and specialised people.
But lasers and geniuses aren’t all that relevant to the experience of undergraduate and graduate students.
Indeed, the reputation a university has can shield it from losing students for not having updated or adequate teaching facilities or good teachers.
If every student is competing to go to your university, offering up the equivalent of several house deposits in the hopes that they’ll come out of your university with some life-and-ego-affirming prestigious piece of paper, then you can probably risk using those tuition fees to line pockets and research labs and let the teaching facilities and quality of teachers crumble for a while.
Because that’s not what most students are there for. That’s not what they’re buying.
The real currency of universities — especially universities with prestige and reputation — is their certificates.
Whether it’s true of the job market or not, there still exists the belief that a law degree from Harvard is worth more than one from the Appalachian School of Law, despite the fact you’ll still learn the law.
You can’t get a Harvard law degree from anywhere else but Harvard.
Yet universities do offer something potentially worth more than their certificates.
People
Access to other people is one the most valuable parts of university.
But it’s not the university itself that provides this, it’s going to university that has value.
On campus we make friends, we make connections, and we perform activities we couldn’t do otherwise.
Universities do contribute to and foster this — important interactions also happen through student-run projects and organisations directly funded by the universities , which can be difficult to coordinate or fund otherwise.
Despite not being necessary to a degree, extracurricular activities are deeply important to the education that constitutes it.
Many interactions integral to a proper education happen in the food court, at club events, at the end of a lecture, or outside the classroom waiting to go in.
These interactions are half the reason you can successfully learn and apply the knowledge on offer.
And no matter how much you try to instigate those sorts of things, they just aren’t going to happen online.
Offline
While there is a lot to criticise about universities and the way they operate and how they leverage their prestige to charge students insane tuition fees for access to content and teachers that are now available online for free, a vibrant, healthy and competent education system is fundamental to a functioning society.
Universities and the physical interactions that occurs in their classrooms and halls and food courts are a big part of their value.
We might be able to learn our Kant and calculus online, but there we lack the community that helps us integrate what we learn into a broader understanding of the outside world.
That’s all the more reason why universities should be made more accessible — as institutions that serve public ends are intended to be — and not just businesses that bankrupt their clients in exchange for a fancy piece of paper.
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