The University of the Future

I recall being frustrated during college. Of course, this was more years ago than I like to admit, but I graduated with a bachelor’s degree in English. I studied literature, of course, and creative writing. I delved heavily into literary and film criticism, specifically critical lenses with which to judge works of art and how art itself is judged. I took basic courses that were meant to round out my education, make it a full-fledged thing rather than just a core focus for an eventual career. At the university, it was about becoming a better, more fulfilled person rather than just a worker ready for his work.

But even while at school, sitting in classes I didn’t need and haven’t ever used for my career, I thought there must be a better way.

I now imagine a system where you only pay for classes that will help your career; where the money you spend is directly tailored to what you’ll need. I envision a world where education is sought for pleasure or use, being inexpensive enough for this, but never forced and certainly never charged simply as a gatekeeping maneuver. Part of the student-fleeing to industrial or trade schools is due to the focused, core educational requirements going hand in hand with potential and eventual earnings outside of the education. The classes you take are a direct expenditure related to how you’ll make money to pay them off within a few years.

Universities have a long and considerably noble history in the United States, bolstered highly by their reputations as being seats of learning and training the next minds of tomorrow. We still romanticize the ivy-draped institutions standing proud against an uneducated world. I can’t necessarily impugn that. I’m grateful for my own education and have found pleasure in the classes I took that don’t necessarily positively affect my hiring and salary potential.

But college has hit a snag in this country: cost and benefit analysis.

The college debt situation, facilitated by predatory loans and a rapidly changing job market that no longer rewards education like it used to, has changed the game from a generation ago, and warped it irreparably from two generations ago. Spending $100,000+ on a degree that no longer guarantees any employment, let alone in the chosen field, seems like a form of gambling madness that even Vegas wouldn’t tolerate. This is a roll of the dice for your entire future and livelihood no longer borne out by the data and the facts. Financially crippled students emerge en masse from universities every year, only to find dead ends and decades of debt and regret.

Proposals for fixing it range from massive loan forgiveness, predatory loan abolishment, government intervention, free college tuition like the model in many European countries, increased scholarship access, a pivot to trade schools as a prime focus for education, winning the lottery, or having a rich uncle die and leave a massive inheritance that pays it all off. The proposals obviously range in likelihood and possible efficacy.

Part of my issue during my college education was being forced to spend money on classes I neither wanted nor needed but that satisfied a nebulous academic requirement. As much as jumping through hoops can be fun, the time, money, and effort required to go through them struck me as little more than academic gatekeeping and an echo from the old world when external educational materials, i.e. books, films, magazines, online classes, etc., were much harder to come by, much less robust, and non-existent without the internet.

But today we don’t have this problem. We have myriad ways of being educated, of finding what we want and exploring our interests not only for cheap, but for free in many cases. Our information resources massively increase every year. Educational videos on YouTube are a booming source of spent hours by millions of people. Apps, the internet, web pages, Wikipedia, you name it, we have commons-based materials that can provide knowledge and education where once the university and a teacher were the only options for betterment.

And yet college expenses go up, facilitated by a nostalgic notion of a shared cultural experience that propels the whole system along. Many careers rightfully require rigorous academic degrees, such as medicine, law, teaching, etc. But many others are left half-completed or forgotten. But the debt doesn’t forget. It follows no matter what career emerges from the hours spent. The credit score from loans and missed payments doesn’t forget.

For the majority of people who attend college but don’t require extensive degrees, I like to imagine a far simpler, cheaper, interoperable system that directly rewards time and makes a commitment to education in the same way a student makes a commitment to their future. We should reward people for their academic endeavors, especially when those endeavors stand to benefit us all. As a modern society, it strikes me as important to have an educated populace that values their knowledge and wants to use it to directly better themselves and their economic situation, or put their education towards careers and jobs that we’ll one day patronize. It could be argued that the eventual money they’ll earn out of college will be their reward for their academic input, and that the career market opened by any degree makes it all worthwhile.

To this, all I can say is a casual “OK, boomer.”

Now that I got my obligatory millennial cynicism out of my system, the problem should be obvious: degrees aren’t rewarded nearly as well as they used to be, let alone well enough to be a suitable recompense for the hours and expenditures involved in attaining it. Trillions in student debt, delayed families and housing purchases, murdered credit scores and a generation forced to live with their parents should be proof enough that the market and the system has changed in a manner quite hostile to the conventional university system. Better hope that dead uncle was really rich.

I’ve been watching the platform-based system of digital badging and course certification with a particular fascination. Google offers many courses in their systems and rewards them with printable, verifiable certificates of attainment, much like a miniature degree. HubSpot offers classes in their systems, as does LinkedIn Learning. Online classes like Udemy and Khan Academy are booming in popularity. For that matter, most of the jobs I’ve worked since college have all trained me in at least one system that I don’t otherwise use. Some have trained me not only in the system but in the policies and wider industry itself.

I can’t help but wonder if the educational system in the United States, so highly locally centralized to certain institutions and schools, and the specific degrees themselves, could be decentralized. Many people start a degree in one school and finish in another, so their education is likely dispersed. Classes are available online or by mail. Post-secondary schools step in to finish the job when an undergraduate degree is completed at another. Online education can fill in gaps or round out needed courses for different schools. Of course, it can be a giant headache to discover which classes transfer credits and which do not, but interoperability is another problem I’ll discuss further.

In much the way blockchain and Bitcoin provide a trusted payment system without an intermediary, could it be possible to decentralize even a particular degree from one school? Could it be possible to decentralize so much from the conventional academic arena that soon universities and schools are barely required for most people at all? I’m not enough of a committed edupunk to insist universities aren’t necessary under any circumstances, but I do firmly believe the amount and style is becoming more and more unnecessary by the day. Let me explain what I mean.

For my particular field, digital marketing, many classes exist online for free, as mentioned above. Good thing, too: when I was in school, classes didn’t really exist for this path, and if they did, they’d now be hopelessly outdated, but the debt for those classes would remain. In the conventional university system that I went through, I’d have to spend $120 on an older textbook with outdated information or spend $220 to get the new one with a single changed sentence and an access code for the online materials that I won’t ever use. And then there’s the cost of the actual class itself, which is likely hundreds or possibly thousands of dollars. I also must have reliable transportation to get me to the class, I must fit it in around my job if I have one, I have to set aside time to study, and I have to do all of this on a schedule I no way have any control over and will be sharply penalized for disobeying.

And here’s the kicker: my field changes so much that all the information I learn in these classes will have to be relearned or possibly unlearned by the time I’m in the actual career if I’m lucky enough to get one after graduation. Much of my work is in SEO. SEO these days could be more accurately called GSEO (or Google Search Engine Optimization), since it’s all spent trying to figure out what Google has changed in its algorithm update or interface adjustment every few months.

(By the way, it’s not a SERP on mobile anymore, it’s an infinite scroll. Changed a few weeks ago. Learned that online for free. Enjoy!)

In my field of digital marketing and SEO, one thing becomes very clear very quickly: the badges earned and displayed from Google, HubSpot, and LinkedIn are worth more than university credits in actual real world know-how. Got the latest Google Ads certification this week? Great, you’re up to date. Took an Excel or Google Sheets class on LinkedIn? Cool, you’re ready for that portion of your job. The classes and seminars offered online are tailored to your time, budget (they’re largely free, although it varies, but they are never more than a fraction of any university credit anywhere), don’t require transportation, and need only a decent internet connection, patience, and the dedication of someone who wants to excel (sorry) in their field.

Many companies and organizations not only pay their employees for this type of continuing education, but actively promote and hire based on the skills as well. In most cases, the badges are considered an augment to an existing degree from an accredited university. But I wonder if these certifications and badges could one day replace that degree entirely. They’d no longer augment the laborious, tedious, expensive, inefficient degree, but sit in its place as a respectful alternative form of education that shows the same real world skills we always prized from university education: commitment, drive, passion, knowledge, focus, etc.

Many companies pay for education anyway if it’s considered beneficial to the company. Some offer their own classes. I see no reason why a college, made up of disparate elements brought together, could become accredited and respected but companies couldn’t. I see no reason why a trade school can offer extensive apprenticeship as a curriculum requirement and have that be respected but a business is somehow unable to train their own employees via a form of on-the-job apprenticeship.

It can be hard to make such fractional, fragmented, and radically decentralized degrees interoperable for a few reasons. One, university degrees require many hours to certify academic attainment. Companies and businesses may augment or supplement educational platforms, but they rarely contain enough hours to match one in the current model. Again, I stress many class hours I took at the university were unneeded and wasteful, but even if I still used 50 of the 124 hours I needed for my degree, that’s more than many businesses or companies offer.

What would help rectify it would be more interoperable, codified standards of what constitutes education. Google and HubSpot badges are certainly notable, acceptable standards of education for those courses. The trick is making all those badges work together. Much like completed credits from two different schools can be transferable between them, so too should certificates from different companies and in different systems be similarly transferrable. So too should classes from schools count alongside digital badges. You should be able to port over company hours spent on training in your field to another career or related aptitude. Education, even from private organizations, should not be siloed or left in walled gardens of past experience but not allowed in present or future opportunities.

In this system, it should be potentially possible for someone to avoid a university or college, if they choose, and focus on completing cheap and free courses from online educational sources (such as Khan Academy, Udemy, etc.) in conjunction with private company skills badges (Google, HubSpot, etc.) and have the accumulated core requirements of a degree matched by those attainments. Essentially, you have a you-tailored, particular, interoperable degree that you can put to use as early or as late as the market will hire you.

It would be a common (and not at all ridiculous) dread for employers that potential job applicants could have faked, forged, or dawdled through their dispersed online degrees, meaning a lot of time spent hiring and firing wrong people instead of hiring one with a neat little degree and school next to their name. Although employers still have plenty of trouble with this anyway in the current system, they’re not wrong to worry about it. The job market can be cutthroat; fake it till you make it doesn’t stop in school, and I’m sure we’ve all embellished just how good we are at Microsoft Office at one time or another. But how can numerous diverse badges (or transactions) from different, often at-odds institutions or companies, be conglomerated into one standard forming an educational whole that can be trusted?

Blockchain, smart contracts, and distributed ledgers have proven an interesting model for this very problem. By definition, decentralized ledgers and crypto transactions occur in trustless environments lacking an intermediary, and yet the whole system arrives at a consensus protocol that enables the continuation of the blocks in the dominant chain. In other words, transactions occur and are verified based on proof-of-work and proof-of-stake, elements also required for educational badges in a trustless environment. Much like Bitcoin operates without a central bank, decentralized ledger badges operate without a central university, ivory towers replaced with interfaces.

A distributed educational ledger can provide rapid, public certification of badges and educational attainment. When a course is completed, the credit is automatically added to the ledger in your name. If a course is not completed, it is not added. Attainment of the credit to the ledger is supplied through oracle data as in a smart contract, meaning there are no professors to sign off on it, no capstones, no thesis, no university seal, and best of all, no alumni association letters begging for donations for the rest of your life. Google can certify their courses that you took automatically, but they have no say over the classes from HubSpot, LinkedIn, Udemy, or any others. Companies and businesses you work at can set up their own educational programs and add in certifications to the public ledger upon satisfactory completion by the employee.

There is naturally a risk of attempted subversion or black-market transactions in an educational ledger. Public and private key cryptography in stored wallets can help ensure valid transactions. For instance, to either add or remove a class from a ledger should require the private keys of both the provider institution and the student to be accepted as a valid change. This is the consensus. This makes it impossible for the institution to revoke the credit without permission, and prevents the holder from attempting an atomic swap or an unverified transaction with others for the credit.

Course requirements for jobs and from private companies will still have to be robust and operate only with active student involvement. For instance, I’ve had numerous trainings for work over the years that were nothing more than just watching videos and certifying that I watched them. Everyone knows these types, and everyone knows the minimize button on the computer is a good friend that helps complete the requirement without actually sitting through the video in question. In my mind, it isn’t a great system of certification to consider watching certain videos for certain hours as constituting adequate training. There needs to be more active input. Google has gotten this down well, as have many others. In most cases, I’ve found people who willfully take courses instead of being forced are usually eager to learn, or much less resistant to paying attention and studying.

Once creating the courses and knowing that badges and certifications are available, companies can offer the courses publicly. This means job applicants could, for very little cost, complete the job educational requirements and be on equal footing with other applicants. These applicants can pour their passion into their job applications for the sake of the work without desperately applying anywhere to have a job that simply helps them pay their outrageous student loans that month. They no longer have to choose between education and eating, or working for the right job instead of settling for the one that actually called back.

Many companies communicate with universities and schools to provide feedback on curriculum requirements, helping influence what is taught by what is needed in the real world. Companies setting their own requirements directly, with tailored education, removes the guesswork from the process. You don’t have to take Marketing and Economics 101 along with French 100 (CORE requirement) and Drawing 270 (CORE requirement) to pass the job requirement—you only need the Marketing and Economics 101 class, since that one will actually be used on the job and it’s all the company wants. Job requirements cut the excess fat from degrees, saving massive amounts of money and time. Take French only if you feel like it.

It always struck me that a public reading completion platform, like Goodreads, almost functions like a self-driven literature course. It is, however, a platform built for reading as pleasure rather than reading as profit or career goal, which means the use of the platform is by choice and for fun—it matters little if people choose to fake what they read, and God knows many people on Goodreads fake what they read—which means a trustless or trustful architecture is immaterial to the social aspect of sharing an interest in books.

But it’s a brave new world. Looking forward in time and technology, it could theoretically be possible to make books and the reading of those books into smart contracts with data supplied by oracles denoting reading completed. It’s already easy to monitor progress of digital reading, such as on Kindle. It could be that the completion of reading a book is also a transaction added to an educational ledger: finish reading a book about banking, and the book is added to the ledger as a completed course, which shows up positively when you apply for a job at a bank. Ambient intelligence and smart pages in physical books could eventually perform the same process as the digital versions. Self-directed and autodidact readers might suddenly find, for the first time in history, their active reading is actively rewarded automatically.

This would, I hope, increase funding and interest in libraries as genuine sources of education. There’s nothing worse to me than publishers and private interest groups seeking to gut libraries and destroy what always was, to me, the most valuable educational portal in the world. I’d find it highly gratifying if someone, dedicated and patient, could find their years of dutiful reading in a library translated to the degree they likely could’ve earned, had they had the money or the ability to sit through a school. An equivalent isn’t necessarily worth less simply because it wasn’t as onerous to achieve, as we’ve seen from the numerous random hurdles colleges are seemingly delighted to erect.

It is, to me, highly unlikely that a system like this will ever remove the university system entirely. It might however, through free market competition, force them to change their degree requirements, and the lack of students in conventional university admissions might encourage them to cut costs down to far more realistic levels. An apt metaphor for me is that the distributed educational ledger might function like a GED does to a high school diploma, as an alternative that is functionally equivalent in real world application and professional valuation.

I’m sure universities will always be around, in some form or another. Many people pay for the experience, the social bonding, the fun, and the in-person educational atmosphere that can’t be quantified or written in a ledger, much as a GED can’t replace four years of high school experience one to one. I won’t ever disregard that. I merely offer an alternative for those who find those things are secondary to the education itself and the resulting career, or who lack funds but are self-motivated to compete for a better life.

I’m sure the argument could be made that I’m wading into dangerous territory with this entire line of argument. It must be said that universities are under attack from both the left and right wings in this country, often for similar reasons. Liberals have taken the attack against universities for saddling too many young Americans with debt they can’t possibly pay off, delaying their start of financially independent adulthood; similarly, they say the high cost of education can prove a strict barrier to entry against poor students, predominantly students of color. Conservatives have taken aim at universities for being hotbeds of liberalism, radicalism, cancel culture, “campus wars” and woke politics. One side says universities charge too much to turn kids into adults, and the other side says the universities charge too much to turn kids into Marxists. And both sides seem to agree that 1984 references are perfectly accurate to their viewpoints.

I won’t even attempt to disentangle the good faith from the bad faith arguments in the above, or try to rectify the good and bad points made by any side. But I will point out a system of distributed educational badges satisfies numerous arguments made by both the left and the right.

The expense is vastly cut down by the decentralized certification system, and with most core requirements coming from private businesses or based directly on transactional needs for a future career, the right can hardly claim Marxism and campus woke-ism is running rampant through the education. How can it be? The classes are chosen by the students themselves, and the requirements for education made by private businesses are the same as any requirements made by private businesses, which the right used to declare sacred. There is no use of public treasury to indoctrinate kids. The critics are free to take the same classes, since the cost is so low, to root around and hunt for the left-wing activism they’re convinced haunts the ledger.

It could also be said that I’m unduly attacking a venerated system for the pursuit of careerism, or advocating stripping Harvard credentialing and awarding it to Google instead. I’ve mentioned above why I don’t feel this is so, but I’m sure that scarcely matters to some. I will say, at the risk of incriminating myself in this area, that I don’t see much difference in spending a fortune at Harvard for the name (read: brand) value of a school versus a name brand of a private company, such as Google or HubSpot. In academia, Harvard means something. In the real world, Harvard is a brand name like Google, used to denote quality and a shorthand for a trusted intermediary people respect. Those who say “high-quality” schools such as Harvard or Yale hold the only route for the best education must not really accept that the world changes, new institutions arise all the time, and that Harvard and Yale were once new, too.

This is all, really, a way of pointing out that educational systems can and should change, the way algorithm updates do. Trusting the old simply because it’s more familiar isn’t a good system to me. I still feel the same frustrations I did in college, wondering why I was paying for classes when the best learning I felt I did was self-directed with the use of the amazing campus library. I wondered then if I could simply pay the $70 annual library fee on my tuition bill and just teach myself, attaining a college education for the price of, equivalent to four years of school, $280.

Of course, no employer would’ve ever accepted that as equivalent, but that has only sent me further down the path to here, exploring a system of smart contracts and distributed ledger learning certifications that add up to the whole. That world is, in my estimation, incrementally creeping into possible every day, closer than you think with every skills badge displayed on your LinkedIn feed.