Summary: University would be higher quality and more affordable if students are able to attend a home university where they take a minimum of one class and the option take the remaining classes at any other accredited university in the country. 

 

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Introduction

On January 29, 2020, I was in my final year of university. I had just received my first ever employment offer as a software engineer at a biotech company. I was about to graduate in three months and I was ready for the next phase of my life. So I did what any responsible “aspiring adult" would do: I put together a budget.

I created a Google Sheet called “Personal Finance Adulting Budget 2020” to help me figure out how I was going to pay for the next chapter of my life. I had everything in there, my starting salary, how much my taxes would be, my rent for my apartment, monthly gym membership, transit pass etc. 

Me: “Okay, So I know how much money is coming and going out each month. how much money do I actually have right now”. 

So I logged into my online banking account, clicked my banking details, opened my bank statement and saw a number that shocked me: $65,000.

Don’t worry, you don’t have to be jealous, that’s not how much money I had. That’s how much debt I had in my student loans. Okay, maybe you’re thinking: “Tomiwa it’s not all about you”. Okay, you’re right: it’s not about me. Take me out of it. The average student with loans has $28,000 in student loans. How did we create a society where a young person is about to enter adulthood and instead of at the very least, starting the game of life at $0, we’re starting $28,000 behind the starting line. A society where despite being the most educated generation, for the first time in modern history, there’s only a 50% chance that we’ll earn more than our parents (Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality,Politifact) .

Come along on a journey with me through the past, present and future of education. As I talk about how we got here, where we are now, and my ideas for how we can create a better future for students, parents and educators.

 

Note: If you want to "get to the point, control+f to the heading titled “solution” or "What you can do".

 

Past: A Brief History of Universities

Universities are some of the world’s oldest human institutions, with origins dating back to medieval Europe when the University of Bologna was founded in 1088 and the University of Oxford founded in around 1096. 

This means that some of the world’s oldest universities are older than most countries. Even a “younger” university like Harvard, was founded in 1638. Note that America was founded on the 4th of July, 1776. This means that Harvard is 138 years older than America itself. 

The exact same thing happened in Canada. University de Laval was founded in 1663, McGill in 1821, and University of Toronto in 1829. All 3 of those universities were founded before Canada, which was found on July 1, 1867. 

A final example I’ll give is the National University of Singapore which was founded in 1905, while Singapore was not found for another 60 years, August 9, 1965.

Think about it, this means that all these countries created a university, before they created a country. 

You can search this up for other countries as well. It’s pretty remarkable how strong this pattern holds

Now, why am I telling you all this?

The first reason I bring up how old Universities are is to highlight the fact that universities were created in a time when knowledge had a distribution problem. I like to say that this was when knowledge was a “bottled resource”.  As opposed to today, where knowledge is more like oxygen and can be infinitely scaled to anywhere in the world via the internet. 

Knowledge was put in a bottle and the only way to get access to this knowledge was to go to whoever had a full bottle, and bring your own bottle so that they could fill it up with this special liquid called knowledge. Especially for really old universities like Oxford which was founded in 1096 and the Gutenberg printing press wasn’t founded until 1440. This means that universities existed before even books existed. Continuing the bottle analogy, any liquid knowledge that I didn’t pour before I died was gone forever.

The second reason is to show you how deeply ingrained the sacrosanctity of universities are to the human condition. Think of how companies we use everyday, for example, Kodak, certain they won’t go anywhere and then they go bankrupt. Next consider, great Nations. Nations like the Roman Empire or more recently Yugoslavia, certain that they won’t go anywhere then seemingly overnight, things change. Now consider that universities are even older than all those things. For some people it might be inconceivable that we cannot possibly have a world without universities.

I’m not necessarily predicting the end of universities because I think universities can be great and play an important role in society. But it’s time for us to have a fundamental perspective shift of the role universities play in our society.

Present: What do Universities do?

Fast forward to 2020 and the world has changed. We need to understand: what exactly do universities do?

Now this is actually a fairly tricky question to answer because we humans lie and pretend. To make this problem more pernicious, Robin Hanson and Kevin Simler, in Elephant in the Brain says that not only do we lie and pretend to other people, we also lie and pretend to ourselves.

One of the biggest lies we tell is that university is about education. Going to university to get an education is like going to a club to listen to music. That is to say, it’s not necessarily a lie, but it’s an incomplete truth.

Scott Galloway, Brian Caplan and Robin Hanson all make the excellent point that there’s actually two other reasons why we go to university and I will add a third one to that list. Now, there are dozens of reasons why people go to University, but these are the four main ones:

Signalling, Credentialing, Networking and Education

  1. Signalling: Look at me, I’m smart. You know this because I go to Stanford and only 4% of people get into Stanford.

     
  2. Credentialing: Trust me, I’m an engineer. You know it’s true because I went to school and they gave me this cool iron ring.

     
  3. Networking, or as I like to call it Invite only Hinge: (For context, Hinge is a dating app.). While most dating apps are for romantic relationships. I would say that university is basically an invite only dating app for romantic, platonic, and professional relationships all tied into one. People want to marry, be friends with and work with people that have a similar socio-economic and intellectual background to them. So university matches all those people together. University might be the greatest social experiment in the world, one of the best places to meet people and build strong relationships that last the rest of your life.

     
  4. Education: Only when all those other needs have been met, do people consider university for the educational benefit. Interestingly, this isn’t to say that education is the least important part of university, but it is the most commoditized.
    1. Research: This is another very important part of universities but this talk is primarily targeted at the undergraduate level where research is less of a factor in what schools students pick.

So the idea that university is about education is a myth. Brian Caplan has a great line where he asks, “If University is really about education. Why do you have to show ID to get into the university gym, but anyone can walk into a lecture hall.”

Just to be clear. I actually think that signalling and credentialing can be useful and necessary for society. I also think that most universities do a good job of sending accurate signals and properly credentialing qualified students. If someone got admitted to Stanford they probably are very smart. If someone attended a medical school in Canada they are probably well qualified to practice medicine.

Today, I’m going to propose that universities should get out of the education monopoly business. 

Universities should focus on what they do best: signalling, credentialing and networking and open the gates of education to allow students to go and get the best education possible.

Future: Solution, Open the Gates of Education

There was a popular meme going around comparing the cost of different streaming services to a Harvard tuition. Memes are greatly misunderstood, people think memes are all jokes. I like to think that memes are the millennials and Gen-Z version of Gallows Humor. We use memes as a way to make jokes about topics that are very serious to us, but we can’t do much to change so memes are our coping mechanism.

But make no mistake about it, this is no laughing matter. This is a very serious issue. Between 1990-2013 and after adjusting for inflation, tuition increased 179%. To put that number into context for you, over the same time period, the average hourly salary only increased by 15%. This means that the increase in tuition is over 10 times greater than the increase in how much money the average person makes. (You can see my raw data and calculations in Open The Gates: Data)

I recreated the Harvard meme comparing Harvard tuition to  various education services like Udacity, Coursera, and EdX. (See how I made the meme in the appendix.)

Now, this graphic is NOT an apples to apples comparison as I explain in the appendix and you shouldn’t only be looking at the sticker price. Let’s be honest, if you have the opportunity to get into a University like Harvard, you shouldn’t be saying “well, I could learn all this stuff online for a third of the price on Coursera”.  

Of course not, what you’re paying for is the brand and the people you’ll meet. We’re all just pretending that the tuition is for education. More specifically, as you can see in this graphic, only about one third of the price is for education, the rest is what I call the “brand tax”. As you can see, pretending is a very profitable business.

By the way, this graphic is for Master’s degrees. I couldn't even find data for undergrad programs. If it was for an undergraduate bachelor’s degree, I think the price difference would be even more dramatic.

So I say let’s stop pretending and let’s “unbundle college”, to borrow a phrase from Rex Woodbury.

I think that universities should focus on being a place where adolescents can go to form a community of people like them entering adulthood. Students can move out of their parent’s house, move into a dorm room, credentialing to help employers know that they’re hiring competent people and signalling to help reassure in-laws that their child picked a suitable spouse. But in terms of education, there should be no reason why only universities have a right to educate you.

The Idea: Education Freedom Program

My idea is very simple: students should be able to enroll at a “home university” where they take a minimum of one course and be able to take all their other courses at any other accredited education institution.

Every university would have a flat tuition fee and a per course fee. So for example in my final year, I enrolled in 10 courses and my tuition was $21,138 plus $1,470 in fees. Suppose that instead of paying a lump sum. I paid the Ancillary fees plus a 10% “home university fee” and then the rest of my tuition was paid per course. 

So for example, I could take one course at my home university, and all my other courses at any other accredited education institute.

That’s it. That’s the tweet. I can end my presentation right here. But of course, there are many questions and objections. I can hear them already, so let’s go through some of them.

Can I say that I really attended a given University if I only took one course there? Of course you can! 

Think about it, Shopify is an e-commerce company that doesn’t own any inventory, Uber is a ride sharing company that doesn’t own any taxis, Twitter is a media company that doesn't have any writers. 

The same way Universities could be an institute for higher learning without necessarily being about educating students. Think about it everything would be the same as the current setup, you would move out of your parent’s home, move into a dorm room, join an intramural sports team, meet your future spouse at the library, attend the Ethnic Minority Student Association dance that your ethnic minority group hosts every March, Google would still visit your campus to host recruiting events which you can attend. On the weekend you go out with your friends, you still attend student conferences. The “university experience” which I really enjoyed by the way, would be the same.

The only difference is that when it was time for you to “go to class”, you would “go” online. You could take Calculus from a professor in Alberta, then ten seconds later, take economics from a professor in Ottawa and English from a professor in Ottawa. Then three times a week, for classes that needed to be done in person or classes you preferred attending in person, you could do those in person.

Why stop there? We could start with letting students take courses from other universities since they are already accredited. However, we could also expand this accreditation to online courses as well.  Online courses like Khan Academy, Udacity, Coursera, EdX, already teach millions of students every year. Governments and Universities should work with these online courses to allow students to get accredited credits for completing online classes.

Intellectual Diversity

Another benefit of Education Freedom is intellectual diversity. I went to one of the top business schools in Canada. One of the benefits of going to a good school is that the professors are excellent, the administrators are organized and helpful, the resources are great and most importantly my friends and classmates are very kind, bright and driven people that motivated me. 

The downside of this is that most of us had similar upbringings, similar socioeconomic status, similar outlooks on life, similar career aspirations. We came in from similar high schools and we all went out into similar careers, rarely interacting with people from other walks of life. This also means that as we get older and start to make hiring decisions, we’re more likely to interview and hire people that went to the same schools as us. This happens all the time, every year, in millions of interviews across the country. We always talk about the social media echo chamber, but universities also have their own echo chambers.

By allowing students to take courses and work on group projects with students from universities all across the country, it gives you more opportunities to interact with people from different walks of life that you wouldn’t normally interact with. It means that when hiring and giving other types of opportunities, you are likely to be more open-minded and hire from a more diverse range of intellectual and socioeconomic backgrounds. You would realize that there’s a lot of other smart students at other schools across the country. It allows you to recognize that great talent exists in places you hadn’t previously considered.

Why would universities agree to this?

A potential question is, “Why would any university agree to this?” and that is a very valid question.

To be honest they might not. In fact they might fight very hard against this. Most schools have a monopoly on education distribution and like most monopolies they fight hard to protect their monopoly. I don’t blame them to be honest, this is understandable and it’s just part of human nature. But it doesn’t make it right or fair.

If you're an educator and you truly want what is best for students, which I believe that a lot of  educators do, giving students the freedom to choose where they get an education is in the student's best interest. Period. End of story.

I tried to very carefully structure this talk in such a way that it’s not anti universities or anti-teachers because I believe that most educators are good people, who are passionate about spreading knowledge and they genuinely want what is best for students. Some of the most influential people in my life have been the teachers. However, because of the business model, their hands are tied. It’s a very tricky situation and I understand that everyone is just trying to do their best to survive.

But remember, tuition has risen 179% in the last 20 years, meanwhile wages have only increased by 15%. This statistic just screams an industry that’s ripe for disruption. Well the way I see it is that the change is inevitable and either it can be a gradual change that universities will be a part of, or it will happen swiftly and universities will be left behind. The signs are already there (New York Times,CBC,Press Progress Bloomberg,CNBC, CNN, ABC Australia, Financial Times). So I’m not even predicting or telling you what I think is going to happen. I’m just analyzing and sharing with you what is already happening. Like William Gibson Said, “The future is already here – it's just not evenly distributed.” Every university has a choice, do you want to be Blockbuster or do you want to be Netflix?

The First Universities to implement Education Freedom will have a first mover advantage

In January 2014, I was facing the most difficult decision of my life. I was picking what university to attend and my final two choices were Queen’s and Western University. Both schools had excellent programs and a great reputation. I’d visited both campuses and they were both beautiful. I could equally see myself having a good experience at both schools. I remember agonzing for weeks over the decision. To say they were evenly tied would be an understatement. The single thing that tipped me towards choosing Western was they had a dual degree Engineering and Business program, with the Ivey Business school. Meanwhile at Queen’s I had to choose between either doing Engineering or Queen’s Commerce (business), but I couldn’t do both. 

I remember thinking to myself, “wow, most students who go to Ivey, probably also considered going to Queen’s. I wonder how many top students chose Ivey because of Queen simply for the single reason that Ivey has the dual degree program?” Imagine, how much money in alumni donations Queen’s has missed out on, simply because of all the smart, driven students that wanted to go to Queen’s but chose not to because they didn’t offer them as much freedom.

The exact same thing will happen with Education Freedom. At first most schools will resist. But then very quickly some very smart schools will offer their students education Freedom and then we’re off to the races. When students are choosing between what schools to attend, just like I did a few years ago, the schools that offer Education Freedom will be at a massive advantage. Students will check to see if their school offers Education Freedom, the same way that students check to see if a potential school offers things like co-op, varsity sports, amenities. It will eventually become a requirement for all schools. The schools who will be last to adapt, will be at a massive disadvantage.

This is an Opportunity not a Threat

I actually don’t see this as a threat to universities. More precisely, I see this as a threat to universities that don’t give their students good value. But if you are a good university, with a good “product”, this is a fantastic opportunity for you. Remember, when I say “product”, the product is everything from good mental health support, career services, beautiful campus and amenities, a strong social network, strong alumni network, intramural sports, extracurricular activities, varsity sports and much more. There are so many things that make a university great , lectures are just one part of it.

Conversely, for a lot of students, even if they could take a class online, they would still want to take it in person. Similar to how, when you go to a music concert or attend a guest speaker, there’s nothing they’re saying that you haven’t already heard on Spotify or Youtube. But the live experience and the interactivity, makes the live in-person interaction worth it. 

For example one of the best classes I ever took was the Ivey Sales Foundations course by Professor Jannsen. That class was very interactive, engaging and experiential (we learned by actually doing sales).Those types of classes work best in person and even if I could have taken that class online, I would have still chosen to take it in person, it’s that good. (Aside: True story, that class that inspired one of the funniest videos I’ve ever made, I got some pretty interesting comments on that one.)

Ultimately, this is about choice and students should have the choice to go and get the highest quality education possible, regardless of if it’s at a different school and without artificial barriers being put in their way.

To illustrate this example, I want to talk about my university professors. During university I had some amazing professors: Matthew Sooy, Quazi Rahman, Aleksander Essex, Diane-Laure Arjaliès, Wayne Adlam, Eric Janssen, to name a few and I know I’m missing some. Now I know why people don’t like making these lists. These are professors that I learned so much from, sometimes I think to myself that it’s unfair that only people who have the opportunity to attend my school can benefit from these great professors.

What happens if I live in a remote Northern Territory or on a First Nations reserve or another underserved community where it’s difficult to attract the best educators. I should be able to learn from these amazing professors as well.

There is no reason that only students who can go to Western University should be limited to learning about security from Aleksander Essex or sustainable finance from professor Arjalies or Accounting (and amazing life advice) from Matthew Sooy. 

Word of mouth spreads rapidly on the internet and It would only be a matter of time before people learned about how great the superstar professors like the ones I mentioned are and they would have an enrollment far beyond their regular class size. For these professors both they and the university would actually make more money and help more students in this new model.

Professor Matthew Sooy is one of the best teachers I’ve ever had in my life. Teaching me very many important lessons about accounting, but more importantly, I learnt a lot of valuable life lessons from him. But only students in my school had the privilege of learning from him. 

Imagine you’re a student in the University of British Columbia and you have the grades and you even got an offer to go to Ivey but your family couldn’t afford the tuition or you weren’t able to move across the country and leave all your friends and family. The University of British Columbia accounting professor is great, but you want to learn from Professor Sooy. You should be able to learn from a world-class professor and overall awesome human being like Professor Sooy. Why deprive a student from the best professors available to them simply because of geography. Especially because of the pandemic, we’re all online anyway!

Or maybe it’s not even about picking the best professor. Maybe it’s simply about saving money. And that’s completely okay. Maybe you need a calculus credit for next year, you’ve seen the syllabus and past exams, you’ve even talked to people who took the class last year and they all said most people end up teaching themself the material on their own. Furthermore, maybe you’re working a part time job to help yourself pay your way through school, so money is very tight for you and your family right now. Maybe you just want to go to the school that offers the cheapest tuition for this course credit; and You know what, you have every right to do that.

So you get two birds with one stone. You can access a high quality education while saving money.

Made Up Reasons why It Won’t Work

This year has been very tough for all of us. However, I think we’ve learned something very interesting during this pandemic: A lot of the “rules” we’ve created in our society are completely made up. We’ve also seen that these made up rules seem to be able to disappear instantaneously. How many companies claimed they would never do work from home, how many schools, restaurants, and various events insisted that it must be done in person. Then 3 months into the pandemic, people are adapting. 

My Iron Ring ceremony is a perfect example of this. I recently graduated as a software engineer and every engineer in Canada  receives an iron ring as part of their graduation. At the beginning of the pandemic they talked about how important it was to have the Iron Ring ceremony happen in person. But sure enough, 6 months into the pandemic and I participated in the ceremony via Zoom and received my Iron Ring in the mail.

Similarly people will have a lot of reasons why this won’t work. Some of them will be legitimate criticisms, and I welcome constructive criticism, it makes the idea better and we can come up with thoughtful solutions to those legitimate criticisms. But a few people will come up with reasons that are completely made up. Reasons that will be manufactured from thin air because they don’t want this to happen due to self-interest. But they will be well equipped with fake post-facto rationalizations about how it’s not possible or why it’s actually a bad idea.

Implementation Details and Tricks Schools Can Play

Like I said, most educators are earnest and genuinely want what is best for students. But because this involves disrupting their own business model, not everyone’s interests will be aligned and there are a few people that will try and use various tricks to prevent students from getting education freedom. Unfortunately, schools also have all the leverage right now and currently there’s not much recourse if your schools refuse to adopt this program, so you have to raise enough awareness about this so we can make a change.

By me preempting these tricks and telling you about it beforehand. It will make it harder for them to try and get away with such tricks. 

Course Obfuscation

This is when administrators will try and pretend like two courses that are pretty much the same are completely different.

Consider how many conversations like this happened in the past:

Student: “There’s this course that I’m interested in taking over the summer that’s offered at the university near my house. I checked the syllabus and past exams and it seems identical to the one offered here. Can I take that one instead and get an equivalent credit?”

Academic Advisor: “I’m sorry but that school offers Introductory Calculus and we offer Introduction to Calculus. It’s a common mistake but it’s completely different.”

Student: “But...I checked my friends’ past exams and they are almost identical”

Academic Advisor: “Hehe, It’s a common mistake, but they are completely different. Trust me if I allowed you to get education freedom, then everyone would want education freedom and we can’t have that.”

By the way, this isn’t to pick on academic advisors, these are good people that are just doing their jobs and trying to do what is best for the university. Unfortunately, the reality is that such walls and rules ultimately end up hurting the students the most.

Price Obfuscation

Some universities will try and get around this by making the “home university fee” be extremely high and then offering courses for $5. This can be avoided by having the government set a cap on the home university fee that it can’t increase by more than 5% of the previous year’s fee. But leave them to charge any course fee they want and by having an open market for courses, the prices would be way more competitive and affordable for students.

Also, note that any university that tries any of these tricks is admitting that they care more about securing profits for themselves than helping students get a high quality education. In some ways, I don’t blame thee. They’re trying to protect their business, which is understandable, but that doesn’t mean that students should pay for that.

Again, universities have complete leverage so they could do this and there’s not much we can do about it. To be honest with you, even though I’ve talked about the issues that might arise I’m not even sure what we can do to stop them. But hopefully if we raise enough awareness about this issue, it will be more difficult for them to try and if you have any ideas, let me know

What You Can do

One of my favorite quotes is: When Aeschines spoke, they said, 'How well he speaks.' But when Demosthenes spoke, they said, 'Let us march against Philip.' In simpler english, I don’t want you to just read this and think: “Hmm, this Tomiwa guy makes some good points. I wish he’d trim his beard but seems like a nice fellow”, then proceed to forget about this video. I want us to take action and actually create a system that is fairer for students. 

I don’t actually know the tactical steps for how social change happens in a society, but my guess is that it probably involves an idea being shared with more and more people. So that’s all I need you to do. Share this idea.

Right now everything I’ve said today is just an idea. It's called the Education Freedom Program, mely because I needed to give it a name beyond just Education Freedom, so it’s easier to search on the internet, but it’s really just an idea. No one owns this idea, but we need to share it as wide and far as possible so we can get more people talking about this. 

Share this article With Two People (one student and one educator)

 

So here’s all you need to do: Share this article or video with two people: one person who is a student and one person you know who is in the education industry, it can be a professor, an administrator, your student council president, anyone! Also send them the link to educationfreedomprogram.org, it has a lot more details that I couldn’t get to in this essay and there’s a subreddit called r/EducationFreedom we set up for people to discuss the ideas more. 

If you work in Education, Bring this Up At Your Next Board or Staff Meeting

If you are in the education industry or work for the government, we need your help. I strongly encourage you to bring up this concept at your next staff or board meeting. If you can’t pass it at the school level, try passing it at the faculty level. If you want me to come and talk to your team about the details of how this could work email me (tomiwa@educationfreedom.org).

If you’re a Student, ask Student Council to Bring this up at Next Board Meeting

If you are a student, email the head of your school or faculty’s student council and make sure it gets added to the agenda of your school’s next board meeting. Post about this on your school’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages. People in student council and student government put great effort into making sure you vote for them and talk about all the great things they will do for students once elected. Tell them that now is the time to act, this is why people voted for them. This is one of the most important things they can do to help students. 

I’ve also created a subreddit for Education Freedom at r/EducationFreedom. So if you have any ideas or want to connect with our community of people interested in making Education Freedom a reality, head over there and start posting and commenting.

Sharing this idea is important because unlike most other resources, not only are ideas infinite, they are also exponential. This means that the more people that know about this idea, the more people that share this idea and improve it, which causes more people to know about the idea and so forth in a flywheel. So tell a friend to tell a friend.

Let’s spread this idea as far as possible so we can open the gates of education and give students the freedom to get a more affordable and higher quality education.