The End of College Quotes

“Spending $100 million on a fancy gym is completely unremarkable in contemporary American higher education. Yet $10 million for a really good online biology course that could serve millions of students is seen as an outlandish, unaffordable expense.”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

“lecture notes are a way of transmitting information from the lecturer to the student without it passing through the minds of either one of them.”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

“To make a good engineer, chemist, or architect,” Eliot wrote, “the only sure way is to make first, or at least simultaneously, an observant, reflecting, and sensible man, whose mind is not only well stored, but well trained also to see, compare, reason, and decide.”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

“Borrow money only for an education that will yield enough of a return in the job market to allow you to pay your loans back.”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

“Fathom.com couldn’t give standard Columbia diplomas to people who took its classes because they didn’t satisfy the second or third criteria. So it inadvertently conducted an experiment to determine the market price of online Columbia courses based only on their educational value. The answer turned out to be: almost nothing. The gates around higher education were more than just physical barriers to entry. There was a wall of regulation, money, habit, and social capital surrounding the industry, keeping competitors at bay. Even as technology wrought profound changes in society around them, hybrid universities grew richer and more expensive than they had ever been.”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

“Studies have found that people learn more from coordinated words, diagrams, and sounds than from text alone. The human-computer interaction experts came to understand that the best designs carefully engaged multiple human senses, which are neurologically designed to receive and integrate information in parallel. Other researchers focused on how computers allow people to connect with one another, and how people connect with information about themselves that we increasingly store in digital form. All of this greatly increased the potential for using computers to help students learn. Yet despite those decades of technological progress and mounting evidence that students learned perfectly well in a variety of technology-aided and mediated environments, it did not change the nature of the hybrid university in any important way.”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

“The use of the ACT-R theory in clinical research has helped confirm the findings of cognitive psychologists, including the crucial role of practice and work in human learning. Although we like to think of learning as arriving in flashes of insight that may be divinely inspired, this just reflects how imperfectly aware we are of our own minds. In fact, human learning tends to proceed along a logarithmic scale, with the first rounds of practice producing meager results that eventually accelerate and result in gains that are orders of magnitude more powerful. This, too, is crucial for education, because it means that people who successfully get to the end of a process of learning have far more knowledge and skill than those who quit halfway. It’s like compound interest on an investment, where you make most of your money in the last few years.”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

“To prosper, colleges need to become more like cathedrals. They need to build beautiful places, real and virtual, that learners return to throughout their lives. They need to create authentic human communities and form relationships with people based on the never-ending project of learning. They need to do it in ways that are affordable and meaningful for large numbers of people. The idea of “applying to” and “graduating from” colleges won’t make as much sense in the future. People will join colleges and other learning organizations for as long or as little time as they need.”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

“Lue has no doubts about whether information technology will be part of the university’s next evolution. “HarvardX is Harvard,” he said, with conviction. “It is us.” Lue”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

“In debating the educational value of lecture videos, some people argue that there’s something about being in the room that mere video can’t replicate. Based on what followed, I can say this: live and taped lectures really aren’t the same. Live lectures are definitely worse.”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

“Organizations become so used to the way things are, they can’t conceive of another way until a new competitor springs up to take advantage of all those inefficiencies and drives the old business to extinction.”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere

“The University of Everywhere is where students of the future will go to college. Parts of it will be familiar to anyone who’s gotten a great college education, because some aspects of human learning are eternal. But in many respects, it will be like nothing that has come before.”
― Kevin Carey, The End of College: Creating the Future of Learning and the University of Everywhere