SB520 is a senate bill purporting to “solve” the bottlenecks created in gateway courses in California public universities and community colleges by requiring these institutions to grant full automatic credit to courses completed via online private platforms. This development has nothing to do with the proper development of online tools that enhance education. Massive Open Online Courses (“MOOC”) are presently free but do cost a lot of money to edit, maintain, and renew, as did previous iterations, namely correspondence courses (130 years old!) and educational TV. MOOC companies have a business plan, including legislative manhandling. How long will the freebie last? A guess: as long as SB520 hasn’t become law! See Robert Meister’s argument.
So, here is a partial recap of US 1973–2013 history as I experienced it:
- taxation levels have been dropping in California since the seventies;
- economic and social polarization increases at an ever more rapid space since the eighties. Salaries of lower and middle class people have effectively decreased in real value, while labor productivity increased for many years at a rate of 2-3% (1% something recently). The wealth created went to: enormous bulges in financial industry, health industry (17% of GDP), war, capitalization of global ventures looking for cheaper, educated labor forces worldwide (note: these mostly publically educated labor forces cost zero to US companies).
- California state support for public universities is still dropping;
- state elected officials, including the governor, channeling the “culture” of their friends the golden entrepreneurs, see online education as relieving them of an annoying moral contract, namely the duty since the fifties to support a world-class public education, including a three-tiered system that provided opportunities to many;
- by creating the conditions for private companies to charge for a desirable product (transferable credits), the cost of education is effectively transferred to those who can least afford the cost of it and its (putative) low quality;
- This in turn speeds up economic and social polarization when we need this tension least of all. We need very well educated young people without debts, without this deepening enslavement.
What Moses will get us out of this new pharaonic Egypt?