It’s interesting to see how different publications are thin-slicing the book and taking what they think will interest their audience. I actually spend very little space in DIY U talking about anything to do with the Ivy League or traditional measures of prestige, and far more time talking about the vast majority of colleges in the country–public universities, community colleges and even for-profits–and the experience of the vast majority of students (and non-students/dropouts, who are getting left out of the game altogether). Nor do I say much about my own college experience. Yet Harvard, Yale, et. al. come up several times in this interview.
For the record, I never claim in the book that Hofstra, specifically, raised its tuition in order to increase its national profile. I just say that if a college wants to increase its profile, it would make sense to raise spending per student and selectivity.
This is my favorite comment:
“Why are so many people here who went to college so upset with this idea? How does expanding access to education to more people in a way that is affordable a problem? And why does it make people so upset?
Are there limitations and problems with this? of course. There has to be some standardization of curriculum, we need to have these courses pass some sort of accrediting process, some types of majors- medical for example, may be impossible to teach this way, etc. But those are doable things, and in the end it may very well be worth it.”
“I actually spend very little space in DIY U talking about anything to do with the Ivy League or traditional measures of prestige, …. Yet Harvard, Yale, et. al. come up several times in this interview.”
Probably because Ivy League graduates are significantly over-represented among Salon.com’s readers and (more importantly) writers. In any case I agree that by and large the elite institutions are not where the action is in terms of educational transformation; indeed we’d expect them to be the very last to be affected, because they have no real motivation to change.
Innovation will occur first on the margins and spread from there. For example, in an area I have some knowledge of, teaching open source software development practices to undergraduate programming students, a provincial college in Toronto, Seneca College, is way out ahead of any elite university computer science program in terms of preparing students for the future globalized world of distributed software development.