THE 19TH CENTURY NOVELIST GRANT ALLEN ONCE stated that he “never let my schooling interfere with my education.” The quote was later, and falsely, attributed to Mark Twain, but one could imagine that an autodidact like Twain would have agreed with the sentiment. The difference between schooling and education is a phenomenon that has been understood and lamented for a while now, but the pandemic has crystalized the difference. Put simply, education has never been cheaper or more accessible, bottoming out at zero dollars in many cases, while the cost of a college or university education continues to expand. We do not see this with other commodities; it is not the case that the cost of gasoline both drops to nearly nothing per gallon but also rises to a thousand dollars per gallon. If the higher education system is selling actual education, then this creates an economic paradox. Fortunately, paradoxes are usually flaws in our understanding, and a logical analysis of these phenomena can create some novel solutions for higher education.
In a 2011 book titled Academically Adrift: Limited Learning on College Campuses, Richard Arum and Josipa Roska examined the effects of the Collegiate Learning Assessment, a test on general critical thinking skills, that was given to a statistically valid sample of college students at the beginning of their freshman year and then again two years later. That assessment indicated that 45 percent of students in the sample made no improvements at all in their thinking skills during their time at college.