Sal Khan argues universities should split into three parts: learning, credentialing, and socialization. Instead of lectures and GPAs, he envisions students building portfolios, doing research and startups, while credentials come from demonstrated work and peer reputation. Leaders at Stanford and MIT agree massive lectures are dying.
Chapters
How will this translate in the university setting? And Khan Academy is kind of focused on— I'll phrase it, you said education, I would say education is made up of learning, credentialing, and socialization. And right now most of what we're doing is the learning side of things, while university is kind of all three of those things. And I think there's a bunch of— in my book, "The One World Schoolhouse," the last third of it there's a chapter on like what would a university, the idealized university of the future look like. And in my mind— so when I think about it from, you know, as at ConAgra we're always hiring, we look at some of y'all's resumes and what always impresses us, you know, if I see Stanford on your resume, I was like, oh, you know, that's impressive because I know how hard it is to get into Stanford. You know, if you went someplace else and you said I got into Stanford and you actually showed evidence of that, it's pretty close. I mean, I know it's like a great experience and everything, but beyond that I then care about what have you done? What is your— and it's hard for me to decipher a GPA or an A or a B in this class or that. I want to see a portfolio of creative works. I want to see, hey, have you written an app? Have you written a book? Have you— have a painting or a sculpture, whatever it might be, that is a huge signal to us. And what I'd also love to know is what do your peers think of you? Are you someone who contributes to a community, who people want to work with? That's the person that I want to work with. And so I imagine the ideal credential of the future is that. It has kind of a baseline, these are your skills, your competencies, and frankly I think pretty much everyone who gets admitted to Stanford is kind of already there. I mean, that can get improved and they can learn more specialized things or broaden their knowledge, but they've already— their critical thinking skills are already quite, quite good. But then on top of that, I want to see what you've made and I want to see kind of how you fit into a community. And so the university of the future, I think, would be very focused on that. It would be you come and— I was just at Carnegie Mellon last week and I told them the same thing. I said Carnegie Mellon or Stanford or— I went to MIT, I told the folks at MIT this. Especially with this caliber of student, they should come and you have the community, you have all the great things, the dorms, the clubs, everything else, but your day-to-day is not in a lecture hall taking notes, trying to prepare for the next exam. Your day-to-day is making things. Your day-to-day is making things on campus, doing research, collaborating, starting businesses, doing art installations, using the community around— and you're in Silicon Valley— leveraging this, doing internships at every firm here, it could be in tech, it could be in design, it could be in anything. And so when you come out, you have this amazing community, this amazing connections with all of your peers, but you also have this incredible experience base and this incredible portfolio that would carry way more weight than any GPA. So I hope that— and I've heard even Don Hennessy say things to the effect of, yeah, he doesn't see why there are 300-person lecture halls in universities anymore and whatever else. And I've heard other university presidents say the same thing. So the hope is— what's interesting about this whole MOOC thing that's happening, I think the single biggest thing is as soon as the MOOCs came out, you had a bunch of people, well, how do we know they work? And then, how do we know we work? Right? Immediately said, wait, we have never really had to address that question. We've never done a double-blind, like here are the students who took physics in 1998, here are the students who did not take physics in 1998, now that it's 2008, let's randomly find them and give them a physics test and let's see if there is any discernible difference between the scores on the two. So it actually started making higher ed and I would say the ivory tower especially, the Harvards, the Stanfords, the MITs start to really reflect on, well, gee, we've been kind of getting a free pass for several hundred years. Maybe it's time that we introspect on ways that we can up our game and that's I think overall been a very healthy thing. But yeah, I see the— I think in 5 or— I think definitely 10 years, You're not gonna have the 300-person lecture hall anymore.
