His opinions in the interview are much more nuanced than the linkbait title suggests. A better title would be, "Dan Ariely says nice things about College, but in the end he's still doubling down on MOOCs."
I was expecting something along the lines of this data: http://www.payscale.com/college-education-value-2013
College continues to provide good value to anyone who anyone who is careful selecting a school and major.
"Of a million MOOC users, the study found that only an average of half of those registered for a course ever viewed an online lecture for that course. And only 4 percent ever completed the course."
I wish I could get 4% of all my visitors to convert!
Many other HN users have raised this point about similar articles, but it bears repeating:
We can't put too much emphasis on completion rates as a metric for evaluating online courses. After all, the cost of entry (in terms of time and energy as well as money) is usually significantly lower than that of registering for an in-person college course.
For as long as this is the case, online courses will have a significantly lower completion rate. I'm not saying they don't have other serious problems — only that completion rates shouldn't be at the forefront of our criticism.
The important question is not if the real live college experience is much more valuable than an online course (it is), or if a college graduate income over their lifetime is higher than a non-grad (it is).
Pretending that college-grad income levels compared to non-grads is a meaningful measurement (obviously a number of factors goes into ones income, most of them psychological) - over the last 20 years - what has happened to the ratio of college expense to increased income over a lifetime. That trend line is one important measure of opportunity. So in this regard the student of 20 years ago was better off.
The costs have skyrocketed in the US in a truly immoral way. Combine that with the current practice of mortgaging your entire future with ridiculous loan amounts, it is an absolute disgrace.
Dan's MOOC class was outstanding - better than most classes I took at Berkeley or Yale.
I do think that he tends to idealize and romanticize the "traditional" 4-year US college experience, which he did not himself have.
Private-university Professor Dan Ariely.
Nice straw-man there, Dan Ariely.
College is like white horses or expensive sports or boats. It's a positional good into which the wealthy will sink endless resources.
The essential cost of a college education is not very high. However, increasing the price of the degree can also increase the perceived value of it, since what people really want (they won't say it, it's not socially acceptable) is access to a higher social class.
Most of my graduated friends have service jobs, or at best, low paying career related jobs.
Learning to weld is more valuable than college for many people.
The most valuable thing I did in college was work on my own projects and work an internship.
I had my degree delivered to my parents house. It's in a drawer somewhere for their sentimental value. It represents lost years of my life.
insanity...but I guess it is not without precedent. In decades past the elite used propaganda to convince young men to go to war and lay down their lives for nothing.
I guess it is easier to convince young people today to go into heavy debt for a degree that has little worth. At least it is easier than convincing them to die for nothing.
Dan's arguments aren't very meaningful to me, precisely because I went to college and my experience was not the one he promotes college to be.
The vast majority of the classes I took were taught by GTFs (Graduate Teaching Fellows -- graduate students) rather than any kind of professor, adjunct professor, associate professor, or teacher. They followed a strict curriculum and "deep conversations" were a very rare occurrence. I was actually only taught by a full professor in 2 classes. The majority of the classes I took were required general education fulfillers, again taught by graduate students, and not subjects I was interested in (read: homework grind). There were tons and tons of facilities, athletics, teams, etc. I participated in a lot of teams and loved them, but I probably only took part in 1% of what the college as a whole offered. At the college I went, the average professor makes $91,000 a year. The average administrator salary was $286,000.
I agree with Dan that college provides enormous value, but It also comes with enormous waste. When people talk about the outrageous cost of higher education, it is because so little of the tuition money goes towards the actual education, and the few activities a student participates in, and a huge amount goes towards giant administrative fees, unnecessary facility fees, research employees who do not benefit undergraduate students, etc. Is college extremely valuable? Of course. Is the already high and increasing price justified? I don't think so at all. Are MOOCs the answer? Not with the experience and engagement level they currently have. I see college as not worth the cost due to problems of bureaucracy and financial models. MOOCs have a much better model of precision education -- you get to learn what you want to learn, and don't have to support the stuff you don't use. Though they are certainly grappling with huge problems of engagement, and the experience is terribly incomplete due to the lack of physical peers and extra-curricular activities.