University as Marketplace

Could we look to the past to envision a future for universities?

I’m Tim Gorichanaz, and this is Ports, a newsletter about design and ethics. You’ll find this week’s article below, followed by Ports of Call, links to things I’ve been reading and pondering this week.

Today’s most elite universities are something like luxury brands. They have shopping mall campuses and marketing departments and their price tag is out of step with their offerings. They have become more about signaling than substance, as the admissions scandal from a few years back showed.

That’s a defining aspect of luxury: paying the price gives you status, not necessarily quality. Consider, for example, how a Ferrari isn’t a more drivable or convenient car than a Lexus, it’s just more expensive. (A recent episode of the podcast Acquired has shaped my thinking on luxury.)

Photo by Brandon Atchison on Unsplash

Universities provide students with signal and status, from being accepted to getting grades to eventually getting a degree. That’s not necessarily a bad thing; the signal may tell prospective employers that a person is diligent and perseveres. But it becomes a problem when the grounding drops out and only the signal remains—that is, when a product moves from being a quality offering, even a premium offering, and becomes a luxury offering. And increasingly, universities are aspiring toward luxury.

Bryan Caplan wrote an op-ed for the LA Times a few years back arguing, “School is all about signaling, not skill-building,” and expanded on these ideas in his 2018 book The Case Against Education. Much has changed in the intervening years, but perhaps not this.

Universities purport to (and should) be about research and education—building useful skills, exploring ideas. They may be becoming less about that and more about matchmaking and delayed adulthood. Again, not necessarily bad things. But we don’t do any favors pretending we’re doing one thing while doing another.

University as Marketplace

Last week I wrote about Christopher Alexander’s vision of a Network of Learning, and this week’s topic follows directly from that, looking at another pattern from A Pattern Language: Pattern #43, “University as Marketplace.”

The commercial undertones of the term marketplace are unfortunate here; Alexander is not advocating for the shopping mall campus. Rather, the University as Marketplace is meant to conjure “the image of the traditional marketplace, where hundreds of tiny stalls, each one developing some specialty and unique flavor which can attract people by its genuine quality, are so arranged that a potential buyer can circulate freely, and examine the wares before he buys.”

Alexander’s goal is to realize the ideals of the original universities, which sprung up in the middle ages as “collections of teachers who attracted students because they had something to offer.” Students could select their own learning path. In contrast, the universities of today (and of the 1970s when Alexander was writing this pattern), is more fixed in the plans of study students can take, and is moving toward homogeneity of ideas rather than variety.

In the University as Marketplace model, anyone can take a course—there’s no exclusionary admissions policy, no need to do a degree defined by someone else—and anyone can offer a course—there’s no hard distinction between teachers and other citizens. The university has a central cluster of buildings along a pedestrian walkway, but is distributed throughout the town. Classes may meet in houses and cafes and other places.

While clusters of teachers and courses would emerge, and some classes would have prerequisites and so on, the emphasis would be on intellectual freedom and allowing individuals to have their educational needs and interests met how they see best.

Alexander identifies challenges with this model, particularly questions of administration: how to pay, how teachers get paid, how to determine costs, how to evaluate teaching and communicate the results to the public.

But still, a few ongoing experiments suggest there’s something to the idea: the University without Walls initiative in Massachussetts, and the open universities springing up around the world.

A Look at the State of Things

In defense of the current university setup, degree programs offer structure to students that they may not be able to see themselves. Once somebody is sufficiently educated, they may know enough to be able to learn on their own, but perhaps a certain educational level is needed first. Students fresh out of high school may benefit from having a set of general education requirements to fulfill to help them build those skills. Coming to know what they don’t know, so to speak.

Alexander acknowledges that we don’t yet know how to administer his University as Marketplace, and I have a sneaking suspicion that figuring out the details would reveal some flaw in the notion, or put us right back where we are. There may be some issue regarding scale, for example—that universities can only do certain kinds of research or offer certain courses because of the centralized administration and how resources are shared.

But there are still some lessons here, some ways that our universities could become more like a farmer’s market, in a good way. And it might be just the kind of shift we need in the coming decades as demographics shift and technology evolves.

First, there are several efforts I see that are already underway. New offerings for adult education, for example, often in the form of certificates and online learning, paid but not within the traditional tuition structure. Some universities have centers that run orthogonal to traditional departments, and these centers offer courses (often interestingly multidisciplinary) that students can take if they’re interested. Many schools offer custom-design majors, letting students direct their own learning. And universities increasingly offer courses in multiple modalities for students to customize their learning. These are all steps on the road to the University as Marketplace.

But in thinking of where universities can or should go in the coming decades and how all this relates to the Network of Learning, I only have questions.

If it’s true that fewer people are going to college, and the cost of college is falling out of step with the expected returns, then perhaps these institutions are not quite offering what people are looking for. It may simply be that in the digital age universities don’t need to occupy the same place they did in centuries past; or it may be that universities can adapt to serve people’s needs better. But change is coming one way or another.

Ports of Call

• An Ethics Test: GPT-4, the newest version of OpenAI’s famed generative AI model, was released recently. I found particular interest in what they call its “system card,” a report on how they trained it for safety by asking it to do all sorts of dangerous or questionable things along the way.

• A Podcast: I appreciated a recent episode of the Knowledge Project podcast with Jim Dethmer about integrity in human relationships—in personal life and at work. Lots of wisdom packed into a short time. I’ll have to listen again and take notes.