We are now, at this very moment, witnessing the mass failure of traditional institutions. This isn’t unique in history, many societies and cultures have evolved to make the primary institutions of society irrelevant. This particular moment is probably only unique in the sheer number of institutions that seem to be failing all at once.
First the music industry, then newspapers, and now film and television all seem to be following the same pattern. They continue to produce the same quality and, in most cases, quantity of a familiar product which each in their own way help define and shape the majority of modern culture. But what was highly successful yesterday is today a failing business. This is not because of changes in their products but changes in the world around them. The social contract by which these institutions had flourished has changed, and only those able to change their institutions to fit the new social contract will continue to thrive in the new world.
One institution that seems to be relatively untouched in the new world is higher education. The free flow of information has changed so dramatically in such a short time it’s interesting that relatively small institutional changes have allowed higher education to maintain the same place and importance in society. Higher education is prohibitively expensive for the vast majority of citizens, and it’s mired with barriers to entry that make it unattainable for many. These are the same kinds of barriers that destroyed the music and newspaper businesses when they were forced to compete with much lower barriers to entry and relatively free alternatives.
Objectively, there is nothing you can learn in higher education that you cannot learn on your own given enough motivation and access to information with the exception of some advanced scientific fields that require access to incredibly expensive equipment. So what is it that continues to proliferate higher education over individual initiative?
We can argue that the quality and prestige of professional educators is what continues to help institutions thrive, but we would have to ignore the reality of the newspaper industry which is failing under competition not from a new professional class but from mass amateurization. I have tried for a long time to find something that institutions of higher education are doing that separates them from any other institution or class of professionals that would account for their relative success today and found nothing. This makes me re-examine the social contract under which they operate and question whether it has really changed as much as I thought.
In the last 20 years, as information has become more accessible and the possibility for self education has increased, most fields have actually **increased** their formal education requirements. This means that at the same time higher education has become more expensive and more barriers have been placed to acceptance, the relative **importance** of a certification that states nothing more than the holder has completed no less than 4 years in a formal institution of education and spent tens, sometimes hundreds, of thousands of dollars has increased. A college certification does not relate directly to the competency of the applicant in any way when compared to another applicant with related experience.
Higher education is aware of it’s relative inadequacy at vocational training compared to real world experience. The best schools all stress the importance of internships. The best computer science schools all **require** a certain amount of internship experience in order to complete their degree, mixing formal education along with real world experience. With this in mind, I don’t mean to say that a degree from a good school is not an indicator of competency, to do so I would have to ignore the high caliber of interns we enjoy at Mozilla. What I do mean to say is that formal education as a **requirement** of employment is to say that such a degree is of greater importance than comparative experience, which I have to disagree with.
Think about it this way; would you hire a candidate with a degree from a prestigious college over a candidate with experience in a prestigious open source project?
In open source we’re able to see the entirety of relevant experience if an applicant has previous experience in open source. We can see email conversations, IRC logs, and commits. We can evaluate an applicants communication skills as well as their practical programming experience. The rest of the computer industry has to hunt down references and go through very lengthy interviews in order to get a much smaller understanding of an applicant and it’s no surprise that they tend to rely much more often on formal education experience in selecting applicants. But looking towards the future, as more work becomes collaborative, more work becomes public, and the barriers to taking on previously professionalized tasks are removed, is it unreasonable to expect other fields to start to have the same advantages we have in open source?
If more people are able to learn whatever they want, make public their works, and improve over time through peer reviews in larger communities, employers will begin to rely more on relevant public work as an indicator of professional competency instead of formal degrees. In fact, it’s reasonable to expect higher education institutions to start to adapt to this **before** employers do, insuring that graduating students have a collection of impressive public works to make them look competitive compared to graduates of other competing schools. As this part of the social contract changes is it reasonable to expect higher education to being to suffer from the same challenges as the music, news, film and television industries?
