Computing Is A Liberal Art, Part 1: Education Inflation
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Education Inflation
Most of us are familiar with the rising cost of education/tuition (at least for those of us in the US). Yes, it's an uncomfortable reality, but that's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about what I learned back in high school: if you want to improve your lot in life, you should graduate college. The thing is, for the last 10 years or so, this admonition has not been correct -- or rather, not sufficient. There are always exceptions, but in general, since the mid-90's a *graduate* degree is required to achieve the same economic advantages earlier generations got with an undergraduate degree. In other words, to reach a given quality of life and/or income level, it takes more education for most folks than it used to.
Why is this so? Well, surely there are multiple factors. I think one of them is the accelerating pace of information creation. That is, there's simply more to know, and what you can know is going up all the time.
Here's an example to help illustrate the point: Imagine there once was a time when diligent students could learn 20% of everything there was to know on topic in their major area of study as an undergraduate. Today, the same students might only be able to learn 2%. Granted, these undergraduate degree holders are still more knowledgable than the general population -- which is increasingly ignorant in every field (vis-a-vis the state of the art). But it's not enough knowledge to be equivalently effective in their domain as a person from a previous generation at the "20% level".
Think this is unrealistic? It is, but maybe not the way you think. My example only increases the body of knowledge by one order of magnitude. In reality, the change has probably been much GREATER! Back in 1985, my high school chemistry teach put a chart on the overhead projector (remember those?) that showed a curve going up to the right exponentially. He said it was the volume of recorded information. Among other interesting statements, he said that someone, somewhere had estimated that the total body of information had doubled since 1969 -- just 16 years! I was amazed. I can't diagram a molecule any more, but I sure remember that chart.
The thing is, it's estimated that the volume of unique new information generated in 2005 was more than the last 5000 years put together! That's all of recorded history, folks. And just looking at technical information for a moment, it's doubling every 2 years. And in 2010, estimates are that it won't be doubling every 2 years... it will be 72 hours* .
It's easy to be stunned by this. You should be stunned. Many of us "feel" the information flow acclerating around us, but the estimate is so dramatic it begs very real, very basic questions. How can a person be effective in this environment? How can companies? Save those questions... they're important, and we'll get to some possible answers in a subsequent post.
For now, I ask you to recognize that the volume of information has grown immensely in the last few years, the rate of growth seems to be accelerating, and everyone will need to answer some important questions.
So what does this have to do with education inflation? Or computing as a liberal art, for that matter? The stock-in-trade of universities is not information, it's knowledge. In the natural world, few if any things grow without limits. In this case, one of those limits may be our ability to turn information into knowledge.
Next in the series: Knowledge is personal.
*Special thanks to Karl Fisch for the information volume and rate growth figures (He's not my high school chemistry teacher, btw).