When I was in college, back around the dawn of time, the central gathering place was the school coffee shop, the Gizmo. Constructed like a ski lodge of stone and timbers, it had a fireplace conversation pit and a lower level with big windows that looked out over a patio that became a skating rink in winter. It was a cozy, friendly place, perfect for meeting after class or on a study break from the library. Discussion of weighty topics and frivolity were present in equal measure. When I get that warm, alma mater feeling, I always picture the Gizmo.
As a young person in the late 60s and early 70s, I was involved in the intentional community movement. My hope was to help build a community that was designed for and around education: the activities necessary for the community's development and survival, e.g. planning land use, growing food, building structures, developing support industries, etc., would be designed to educate in a cross-disciplinary, experiential, project-oriented way, obviating the need for schools as distinct institutions. Unfortunately, I lacked the charisma to influence community development, and intentional communities were generally too poorly funded to accomplish anything, including, in most cases, survival. Too bad we didn't think of inventing Starbucks.
Later in life I contemplated a different take on the same idea. In this scenario, a school would attempt to attract a few small businesses and teachers with research grants. The students would be the workers and research assistants, thus helping generate an income that would make tuition unnecessary. If they were having fun, the students would work hard to keep the school afloat. It was just an idea. I never took it anywhere.
Starbucks' remarkable commitment to tuition for its workers to complete college degrees online has caused me to think about such things again. Although I've been been interested in online education as long as there's been an internet, and although the ubiquity of free online courses is widely regarded as making higher education available to the masses for the first time, I have some issues the idea that physical colleges might become irrelevant. In the first place, I don't think replacing many diverse voices with a few loud ones, however respected those might be, is a good idea.
Even if courses don't serve thousands of students, there's a disconnect between what I found valuable about my college education and what MOOCs provide. Every bit as much as the lectures, my college education came from interactions with my fellow students. Online education tries to emulate this with social media, including video conferencing, and perhaps this is enough, but I doubt it. Online sex may be exciting, but until virtual reality becomes a lot more sophisticated than it is now, it doesn't strike me as a good substitute for the real thing. In the same way, doing anything with one's fellows online lacks a dimension found in physical proximity. So are we stuck with paying a lot of money to live in dorms in order to get the college experience? Maybe not. Maybe Starbucks is onto something even more than they know.
If you work at Starbucks and live at home, taking online courses, you will be in physical proximity with fellow students. You'll be doing things together. Sure, it's just making and serving coffee, but we've probably all had a lot of fun with our fellow workers while doing nothing more challenging (and besides, that's not as easy as it looks). You may be taking some of the same courses as others, so you can discuss and study together. Working at Starbucks and taking online courses just might be a lot more like going to college than taking the same courses by yourself at home, because, although you could hang out with friends in the latter case, you and your friends wouldn't be doing the same thing together. I think that makes a big difference.
If other companies would build on the Starbucks model, making a positive contribution to education rather than demanding breaks on education-funding taxes for building in a given town and then bitching because American schools don't turn out enough qualified tech workers, maybe an ecosystem of work/college environments could develop.
When I was in college, ideas were encountered in the classroom, but got discussed, refined, and tested in the coffee shop. Maybe they can be again.
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