Mastery learning and one-on-one learning aren’t cost-efficient at scale.
Universities also usually have free tutoring centers. So, for the cost of tuition, you get access to (often more than) 8 hours of tutoring a week in addition to all the other stuff.
Also 8 hours a week would be an absurdly low courseload.
Also 8 hours a week would be an absurdly low courseload.
At Oxford, undergraduates in humanities and social sciences get 2 hours per week of lectures, and 2 hours per week of 1:1 or 2:1 tutorials. That's half the 8 hours I'm suggesting (and even less when you consider that Oxford has only 24 weeks of term per year). Do you think those students are taking an 'absurdly low courseload'?
So, for the cost of tuition, you get access to (often more than) 8 hours of tutoring a week in addition to all the other stuff.
Per course, right?
Most of the time is spent reading. Some of the time is spent writing. 2 hours per week are spent in tutorials discussing what you've read and written.
Out-of-state fees raise tuition from $17K to $51K, but $17K is still a lot of money (and overall costs add up to about $51K a year even for in-state students.)
Besides expensive $100/hour tutors - Berkeley could (as many schools do) hire cheap undergrads from the previous cohort.
It also seems to me that the basic idea of mastery could be implemented with self-paced learning and individualized assessment, which could potentially be batched based on milestones.
which could potentially be batched based on milestones
Such an assessment is not an evaluation of future potential, nor is it a moral judgment. The purpose is simply to determine what the next thing to learn should be.
Sure, perhaps you leave it up to the student to decide which group they should be in. But what if they move to the next group when they're not ready? Does the tutor cater to them or to the rest of the group? What if some demographic group is less confident on average, and doesn't move ahead even when ready?
The setup you've described might work, but people will find all sorts of reasons to be mad about it, to claim discrimination and/or to use whatever outcomes there are to claim that somebody is being treated unfairly.
The academic literature on 'mismatch' doesn't all lean in one direction.
You should read Sonja Starr's article on the coming magnet school wars. She definitely has an opinion, but she made a decent attempt to present fairly both sides of each issue she covers.
I was at the tail end of elitist education in the UK (79-82) and we complained about tutorials being two students at a time instead of one on one, and seminars with 10 of us. How little we knew of what was to come.
I was at the tail end of elitist education in the UK (79-82) and we complained about tutorials being two students at a time instead of one on one
- we were only studying two courses at a time, so we only had two tutorials per week
- there were only 8 weeks per term, so 24 weeks per year
- 2 x 24 is 48
- let's say the tutor needs to be paid $100 for the session and $100 for skimming the essays beforehand; that's $100 per student
- 48 x $100 is less than $5k
- in the US, even state schools charge much more than $5k per year
That said, I love being the dumbest person in a room.
Still putting aside the world of tech, we definitely benefit from the existence of geniuses in a way that enhances the lives and careers of vast numbers of people. Ideally we'd make room in education for everyone from special needs up to especially gifted, but as you say... money.
I don't know how well ChatGPT et al. would work if applied at scale as part of a mastery-based curriculum. I especially wonder if students would be as motivated to learn by chatbots as they are by human interaction. But considering the low cost and ready availability of LLM tutors, it's at least a possibility worth considering.
Exactly. One-on-one tutoring isn't scalable.