Warning: depressing.
I really don’t want to link to this post (from @popenici – and from which I have borrowed the title of this post), but feel I have to so you can have some context to why I’m writing this. I read quite a lot (OK, an awful lot) of HE and technology related blogs in my position as wonk-in-waiting, but I do tend to choose the vaguely politically and socially aware ones – many of which can be seen in an unsorted list to your right.
This is an example of one of the “others”. Rather than pull it apart line-by-breathlessly-technodeterminist-line, I thought I’d write my own alternate version.
By 2050 “traditional” on campus attendance is increasingly rare. Not because of any explosion in technology-supported learning, but because the price of fossil-fuel derived energy is such that travel is essentially the preserve of the super-rich. So, largely, is the internet – with increasing attacks on net neutrality leaving the speed of non-commercial traffic unusably slow, even the ubiquitous, cheap low power devices left over from before the plastics rush are primarily used with offline storage.
A little over 2% of young people in the UK attend one of 20 or so traditional institutions. The benefits of doing so are primarily social, these are the sons and daughters of the elite, networking and pairing off. Most regular people experience post-compulsory education via employer training – which is increasingly rare and is very seldom accredited for transferable use. Low wages and long hours have effectively killed the personal learning culture (though the resurgence of trade unions has begun to correct this), and following the growth of corporate-owned schools since the launch of the “Free School” movement in 2010 few people have the skills or intellectual curiosity to learn outside of work.
Globally, the picture is broadly similar to the UK – though only in England does government spending on Higher Education top 5% of GDP. Nearly all of this is used to write off student loans against fees, taken out more than 30 years ago: due to mass unemployment and low wages very few of these were ever paid back. This led to sharp rises in initial fees for students, driving the majority of institutions out of business. Anyone who does study at a University does so in one within their own country – international travel is rare and very expensive.
For a while in the mid-late teens, there was an explosion in online learning, but this tailed off as a tightening of financial margins in traditional institutions meant that the largely voluntary content development and student support processes stopped being supported. Increasing corporatisation of internet connectivity rendered online discussion prohibitively expensive, with both Facebook and Twitter closing accounts belonging to low net-worth individuals in 2019. The demands of advertisers drove this threshold up sharply, until the Second Great DotCom Bubble of 2020 and the collapse of Google rendered the old “free” internet largely unviable. Most connectivity these days is via single use applications able to link to resources on only a small number of severs.
In the corporate training world BlackBoardSharePointPearsonNewsCorp is the dominant provider, delivering an end-to-end managed hardware and software ecosystem for direct delivery of information to staff. It’s very much on a just-in-time basis, with content being key and having more in common with the manual than the textbook. BBSPPNC is most people’s only contact with online information other than paid-for access to traditional mass media (news, television, music) and email/IM.
In many ways, the world of 2050 has more in common with the world of 1950 than any intervening time. Years of austerity have depleted public services and social mobility, and standards of living are broadly similar. The expected growth in new industries was stifled by continued economic stagnation – most jobs in 2050 would be recognisable to a visitor from 1950, with manufacturing, small-scale farming, mining, heavy industry, and service industries (including security and medical roles) being primary employers in the UK. Welfare is next-to non-existent, and extended family living is now normal, with most people born in 2050 expecting to die within 25 miles of their place of birth, 50-60 years or so later.
It may be already clear that only those who are not in thrall to the dying myths of the age will be able to see the 2050 as anything other than a slightly enhanced version of life a century ago. Institutions (and countries) aware of their supposedly crucial importance to knowledge generation, innovation and their overall contribution to society and economy have no time to waste if they want to be part of the scene in 2050. This is why vision – and knowledge to achieve this vision – may be one of the most valuable commodities in 2012.
Leave a Reply