When Teachers Go Viral: The Food Court Degree in Your Future

Here’s the future of college: Most degrees will be granted online, the best teachers will become rock stars, and eventually students become largely untethered. They will demand that universities let them mix and match courses from any school.

The prototypes for this can be found in the hit-driven economies of college sports and the movie business. Top football and basketball coaches now get multi million dollar salaries, because the universities make many times that in revenue from athletic programs. Great teachers are as rare as winning coaches. The only difference is that until now there has been no way to capitalize on teachers, because unlike TV contracts for basketball games, traditional classes don’t scale very well. The biggest lecture halls can hold no more than 1500 people or so, and, perversely, many students who are present have little or no interest in the subject no matter how brilliant the lecturer. Like non-sequel hit movies, finding great teachers is a process that cannot be replicated reliably. The only way to find them will be to hire en masse and exploit the very few who become hitmakers.

Freemium U

It appears that the best way for colleges to generate revenue online will be the freemium model. Anyone can view videos of the courses and perhaps participate on the message board at no charge. To get class credit and a teaching assistant to hand-grade the work that can’t be graded via software, you’ll need to pay. To get the teacher to grade your papers, you’ll have to pay much, much more. But as Pat Quilter of Quilter Labs says, “Who knows? Maybe students would actually take courses, life-long, to learn, instead of just to get a degree.” Zany thought.

If the universities are smart they will share this revenue with the teachers. Most American students won’t choose the pay-for-office-hours option, but it will be a high-priced add-on that will still generate significant revenue from wealthy Chinese and Russian parents who are accustomed to paying obscene amounts in bribes to officials at every level in the bureaucracy just to get baseline services. In Shanghai some kindergarten teachers are demanding $10,000 “gifts” for school admission. How much do you think those parents will pay for the top MBA faculty at Wharton to tutor their baby plutocrat-to-be?

The Hit-Driven University

It’s the rock star teachers that will prove to be the most interesting case, and by far the most lucrative for the university. All online classes will be reviewed and scored at closely followed ratings sites whose popularity will dwarf that of the fatally flawed but currently influential US News and World Report’s college ratings guide.

The hottest teachers will go viral within a year or two at Ivy League schools, and in three to five years at less prestigious institutions. Their classes will burgeon in popularity among paying students. The universities will be forced to hire armies of teaching assistants to grade work. Tenured but less popular faculty will make catty remarks about how long it takes to get budgets approved and how hard it is to get the department admin’s attention anymore.

Today’s parents know exactly what they want, starting with the best day care center with its 5 year wait and relocating to the neighborhood that gets the best SAT sources. They have checklists for every way to maximize returns on their pampered little babies’ life experiences. Top of the checklist is Ivy League schools, but consumers of education will see very quickly that good teachers can be found anywhere in the world.

Auctioning Dr. Zeyen

Parents will be forced to compete in an auction format to get individual attention from the teacher. Want that teacher to grade your papers personally? Kick in an extra $20,000. Get the teacher to be one of your dissertation advisors? A hundred grand. Don’t procrastinate. Put off deciding on your degree emphasis for a term and those prices might shoot up to $22,500 and $125,000. Dr. Mary Mark Zeyen, my piano and theory teacher in college, would have deserved every cent of it.

Editorials will harrumph that schools have lost their way and that the meritocracy is dead. Everyone will agree. Administrations will keep jacking up prices anyway. The most popular teachers will negotiate individual contracts. Tenure will mean nothing to them just as it has no meaning to basketball coaches. The only thing that will matter is revenue.

It is also possible that the freemium model will be applied more selectively for these teachers, and you’ll only get, say, the first two classes for free instead of the whole course. Why not? Quite possibly 10,000 other people will be only too willing to pay for read-only access to a statically recorded course by a rockstar teacher if it makes learning calculus bearable.

Professor Dark Star

For evergreen subjects like statistics, history, or literature some teachers will remain popular after they die or quit teaching the course. There will be diminished value because they won’t or can’t score papers or participate on the message boards. Highly rated teachers assistants will have long twilight careers as known disciples, the way Leonard Peikoff fed off the literary corpse of Ayn Rand for decades or piano teachers with “direct from Beethoven” provenance can charge extra for their pedigree.

Smart institutions will nail down intellectual property rights during contract negotiations. Smart teachers will hire agents and lawyers ahead of time. That won’t happen right away. A few rock star teachers will die suddenly after their courses have been completed, and schools will duel with families as to who owns IP rights to ancillary YouTube videos, email accounts, and teaching plans. Universities will do everything they can to keep the revenue stream from good dead professors healthy, a prospect only slightly less grisly than the former ship captain in 1974’s “Dark Star”, a science fiction comedy in which the spaceship’s former captain is technically dead but cryogenically preserved as an advice-giving brain with some kind of interface to the ship’s computer.

What about the majority of teachers who aren’t rock stars? Those everywhere but the extreme right of the ratings bell curve will be fungible. They won’t lose their jobs to the rock star teachers because GE requirements still need to be filled, just as the fencing coach doesn’t necessarily get canned just because the football program is in the NCAA.

Websites and TV shows will do fawning profiles of rock star teachers, especially newly minted ones. The best novelist of the English language in the 20th century was Vladimir Nabokov, a Russian. A talent of the same magnitude could emerge from Guangdong. Maybe she’ll be photogenic, and end up with a multiyear contract at Brown while getting some decent endorsement money from the Wall Street Journal book review section.

When A&M Wins the Stats Bowl

As it becomes clear that rock star teachers can pop up anywhere, prestigious universities will lose some of their mojo. Previously unheralded institutions will get bumps in their popularity. We all know that Texas A&M has an awesome agricultural department, but who’s to say they don’t have right at this very minute employ the best statistics teacher on the planet? What if by coincidence they also the best computer graphics teacher in the Western states because her husband will always be an Aggie and refuses to move to Palo Alto?

Suddenly those Chinese princelings and Russian plutocrats could make A&M the go-to place for top engineering students. A&M might just choose to hire a couple more rock stars paid for by the football program to prove to the world that they aren’t just a place where future farmers devise low-water farming techniques and disease-resistant crops. Maybe they’ll be home to the Statistics Bowl, an event with all of the charm of a spelling bee, the revenue of a fencing program–and ground zero for high-tech firms on the hunt for experts on big data.

End Game: The Food Court Degree

The end game will be an attempt from students to force universities to standardize degree requirements and transfer protocols, because the logical way to get the highest quality education will be to cherry pick rock star teachers regardless of the school you’re enrolled in.

You might get a killer art history prof at Yale, a machine learning prodigy from Stanford, and that up-and-coming American Lit chick out of Guangdong. Universities will obviously resist because they won’t want their monopoly power to be challenged, because they will have honest disagreements about standardization, and because above all else they will fear becoming commodities. Getting a degree will be like visiting a food court where you can get Ethiopian bread, Mongolian beef, and chicken nuggets if you brought the kids.

Eventually the market will win out. Just as AOL and CompuServe and Microsoft were forced by consumers to use Internet protocols in the 1990s, you will be able to assemble exactly the degree you want. Currently to get to the meat of your English Lit degree you’re often force fed a shedload of impenetrable courses because a tenured bureaucrat decided in 1989 that deconstructionism might become an enduring political movement.

Unlike today’s standardized degree in social ecology or feminist studies, however, you will have only yourself to blame if your masterfully designed Exobiological Critical Thinking degree leaves you a half million in debt and delivering pizzas to Standard CS grads at the local tech incubator.