You Can't Buy The Ivy League Online

Money, or lack of it, can do a lot of things. It can launch a dot-com, win Dubya's primary and cause the demise of the Hasty Pudding. But the most recent question that has set academic tongues wagging across the nation is whether it can buy the success of an online university proposing to disseminate an Ivy League-caliber education to the masses, for free.

Thirty-five-year-old Michael J. Saylor, MIT alum and CEO of high-tech company MicroStrategy, is trying to do exactly that.

An Air Force officer's son who attended college on a full scholarship, Saylor announced in March his plan to create an online university that would make an Ivy League-quality education available to all, at no cost. By putting professors' best performances online, Saylor told Time Magazine, "you can make something even better than Harvard." With his $100 million pledge toward accomplishing that goal, it looks as if Saylor's dream is on its way to becoming a reality.

The great benefit of Saylor's proposal is that it could offer a bare bones college education to people who otherwise might not be able to access one. Working mothers or those with full-time jobs, for example, could take advantage of this resource.

But what Saylor seems to have overlooked is that a virtual university simply cannot offer the same experience its real world counterpart can. Sure, you can stick a few lectures online and have chatroom discussions, but that's like having an Oreo cookie without the cream. What's missing in a virtual learning experience is life outside the classroom.

I would argue that a quarter, perhaps more, of what undergraduates learn is learned outside the classroom. I can't remember the number of times a friend and I have stayed up late into the night (invariably the night before a paper is due) discussing subjects such as racial profiling and the causes of the English Revolution. Sections are helpful, of course, but their main importance is in laying the groundwork for further exchanges of ideas that would rarely occur without the physical proximity of other students. Distance learning, in contrast, is a very individual approach to learning complemented only by infrequent chatroom discussions.

In addition, the quality of the educational experience the best online university could offer is inferior to that made available by real universities. Anyone who has ever missed a lecture and watched the video afterward knows that the experience of being in a real live lecture hall, surrounded by dozens of your peers, is an unparalleled learning environment. Offering lectures online as the prime vehicle for teaching is asking for student disengagement.

Society also supports education acquired via traditional means. Take correspondence courses, for example. These courses offer a form of distance learning similar to that proposed by Saylor; in both, students sign up for courses and can get a degree without ever stepping foot in a classroom. Yet, degrees earned through established correspondence courses are commonly held to be inferior to those earned at universities. An online university would simply be the high-tech version of the correspondence course.

So while Saylor's idealistic vision of a virtual university for all is laudable, it will never be the Internet Ivy experience for which he hopes. The merits of distance education can best be summed up by Georgetown English Professor Carole Fungaroli's comment, "It's the same as sex on the Internet. You can get it online, but it's not as good as in person."