Yeah but you wouldn't get access to active research projects, equipment (including lab equipment and super-computers), and various other programs. The point of universities has always been network effects, not the quality of pedagogy of individual professors.
Universities also usually have free tutoring centers. So, for the cost of tuition, you get access to (often more than) 8 hours of tutoring a week in addition to all the other stuff.
Also 8 hours a week would be an absurdly low courseload.
Also 8 hours a week would be an absurdly low courseload.
I'm not talking about 8 hours per week of studying. I'm talking about 8 hours per week of 1:1 tutoring. Those 8 hours would be used to improve the effectiveness of the other 32 to 40 hours the student spends studying.
At Oxford, undergraduates in humanities and social sciences get 2 hours per week of lectures, and 2 hours per week of 1:1 or 2:1 tutorials. That's half the 8 hours I'm suggesting (and even less when you consider that Oxford has only 24 weeks of term per year). Do you think those students are taking an 'absurdly low courseload'?
So, for the cost of tuition, you get access to (often more than) 8 hours of tutoring a week in addition to all the other stuff.
At which US university does every student get an average of 8 hours per week of 1:1 tutoring?
Those facilities are incredibly overrated. Most universities have outdated labs not state of the art stuff. And certainly they aren’t in line with the cost. Berkeley doesn’t even have supercomputers.
> For the same price as 'out of state' tuition at UC Berkeley, you could hire a $100/hour tutor for 1:1 sessions, 8 hours a week.
Out-of-state fees raise tuition from $17K to $51K, but $17K is still a lot of money (and overall costs add up to about $51K a year even for in-state students.)
Besides expensive $100/hour tutors - Berkeley could (as many schools do) hire cheap undergrads from the previous cohort.
It also seems to me that the basic idea of mastery could be implemented with self-paced learning and individualized assessment, which could potentially be batched based on milestones.
In this case "ability" would basically be "the set (or sequence) of course objectives that you have completed so far."
Such an assessment is not an evaluation of future potential, nor is it a moral judgment. The purpose is simply to determine what the next thing to learn should be.
If you're in a group and some of your peers leave the group because they've mastered the material, you might feel like you're being 'held back'. And observers might feel that certain demographic or identity groups are being 'held back' at a higher rate than others.
Sure, perhaps you leave it up to the student to decide which group they should be in. But what if they move to the next group when they're not ready? Does the tutor cater to them or to the rest of the group? What if some demographic group is less confident on average, and doesn't move ahead even when ready?
The setup you've described might work, but people will find all sorts of reasons to be mad about it, to claim discrimination and/or to use whatever outcomes there are to claim that somebody is being treated unfairly.
The academic literature on 'mismatch' doesn't all lean in one direction.
You should read Sonja Starr's article on the coming magnet school wars. She definitely has an opinion, but she made a decent attempt to present fairly both sides of each issue she covers.
You cannot effectively teach children UNLESS you do ability grouping. The gap just becomes too large. You can't teach one child calculus while another in the same math class can't multiply.
Cost. Those tutors don't come cheap. Moving from university for a tested elite to general access altered the money component and now, we achieve a lower peak for more people.
I was at the tail end of elitist education in the UK (79-82) and we complained about tutorials being two students at a time instead of one on one, and seminars with 10 of us. How little we knew of what was to come.
Very much so, part of it is undoubtedly the result of changing social norms, politics, and a broadening middle class... part of it is an increased population and changing economics from globalization and other factors.
I will say as a very average product during elitist times I do not personally have a problem with more average uplift than just a spike of brilliance. I suspect I am swimming against the "10x" zeitgeist here but I'm unconvinced geniuses at scale do a much as people want to think.
That said, I love being the dumbest person in a room.
Without in any way trying to draw the collective wrath, I think it's worth saying that being "10x" isn't really brilliance, it's just high productivity. This is doubly true when the work being done is not exactly groundbreaking.
Still putting aside the world of tech, we definitely benefit from the existence of geniuses in a way that enhances the lives and careers of vast numbers of people. Ideally we'd make room in education for everyone from special needs up to especially gifted, but as you say... money.
It's a good article, but I kept waiting for a suggestion that never arrived: that perhaps individualized tutoring can be provided effectively by interactive AI.
I don't know how well ChatGPT et al. would work if applied at scale as part of a mastery-based curriculum. I especially wonder if students would be as motivated to learn by chatbots as they are by human interaction. But considering the low cost and ready availability of LLM tutors, it's at least a possibility worth considering.
Yeah but you wouldn't get access to active research projects, equipment (including lab equipment and super-computers), and various other programs. The point of universities has always been network effects, not the quality of pedagogy of individual professors.
Universities also usually have free tutoring centers. So, for the cost of tuition, you get access to (often more than) 8 hours of tutoring a week in addition to all the other stuff.
Also 8 hours a week would be an absurdly low courseload.
At Oxford, undergraduates in humanities and social sciences get 2 hours per week of lectures, and 2 hours per week of 1:1 or 2:1 tutorials. That's half the 8 hours I'm suggesting (and even less when you consider that Oxford has only 24 weeks of term per year). Do you think those students are taking an 'absurdly low courseload'?
At which US university does every student get an average of 8 hours per week of 1:1 tutoring?Those facilities are incredibly overrated. Most universities have outdated labs not state of the art stuff. And certainly they aren’t in line with the cost. Berkeley doesn’t even have supercomputers.
> For the same price as 'out of state' tuition at UC Berkeley, you could hire a $100/hour tutor for 1:1 sessions, 8 hours a week.
Out-of-state fees raise tuition from $17K to $51K, but $17K is still a lot of money (and overall costs add up to about $51K a year even for in-state students.)
Besides expensive $100/hour tutors - Berkeley could (as many schools do) hire cheap undergrads from the previous cohort.
It also seems to me that the basic idea of mastery could be implemented with self-paced learning and individualized assessment, which could potentially be batched based on milestones.
In this case "ability" would basically be "the set (or sequence) of course objectives that you have completed so far."
Such an assessment is not an evaluation of future potential, nor is it a moral judgment. The purpose is simply to determine what the next thing to learn should be.
If you're in a group and some of your peers leave the group because they've mastered the material, you might feel like you're being 'held back'. And observers might feel that certain demographic or identity groups are being 'held back' at a higher rate than others.
Sure, perhaps you leave it up to the student to decide which group they should be in. But what if they move to the next group when they're not ready? Does the tutor cater to them or to the rest of the group? What if some demographic group is less confident on average, and doesn't move ahead even when ready?
The setup you've described might work, but people will find all sorts of reasons to be mad about it, to claim discrimination and/or to use whatever outcomes there are to claim that somebody is being treated unfairly.
The academic literature on 'mismatch' doesn't all lean in one direction.
You should read Sonja Starr's article on the coming magnet school wars. She definitely has an opinion, but she made a decent attempt to present fairly both sides of each issue she covers.
You cannot effectively teach children UNLESS you do ability grouping. The gap just becomes too large. You can't teach one child calculus while another in the same math class can't multiply.
Cost. Those tutors don't come cheap. Moving from university for a tested elite to general access altered the money component and now, we achieve a lower peak for more people.
I was at the tail end of elitist education in the UK (79-82) and we complained about tutorials being two students at a time instead of one on one, and seminars with 10 of us. How little we knew of what was to come.
- we were only studying two courses at a time, so we only had two tutorials per week
- there were only 8 weeks per term, so 24 weeks per year
- 2 x 24 is 48
- let's say the tutor needs to be paid $100 for the session and $100 for skimming the essays beforehand; that's $100 per student
- 48 x $100 is less than $5k
- in the US, even state schools charge much more than $5k per year
Very much so, part of it is undoubtedly the result of changing social norms, politics, and a broadening middle class... part of it is an increased population and changing economics from globalization and other factors.
I will say as a very average product during elitist times I do not personally have a problem with more average uplift than just a spike of brilliance. I suspect I am swimming against the "10x" zeitgeist here but I'm unconvinced geniuses at scale do a much as people want to think.
That said, I love being the dumbest person in a room.
Without in any way trying to draw the collective wrath, I think it's worth saying that being "10x" isn't really brilliance, it's just high productivity. This is doubly true when the work being done is not exactly groundbreaking.
Still putting aside the world of tech, we definitely benefit from the existence of geniuses in a way that enhances the lives and careers of vast numbers of people. Ideally we'd make room in education for everyone from special needs up to especially gifted, but as you say... money.
It's a good article, but I kept waiting for a suggestion that never arrived: that perhaps individualized tutoring can be provided effectively by interactive AI.
I don't know how well ChatGPT et al. would work if applied at scale as part of a mastery-based curriculum. I especially wonder if students would be as motivated to learn by chatbots as they are by human interaction. But considering the low cost and ready availability of LLM tutors, it's at least a possibility worth considering.
But the fast food drive through model sells and scales better than worrying about nutrition
> In short, the problem comes down to scarcity
Exactly. One-on-one tutoring isn't scalable.