Ivory Tower

I've always felt, when I step onto a college campus,

a slight element of melancholy in the air.

If you're a teacher,

you arrive every fall semester for the new year,

and you know that you've gotten a year older,

but the students are the same age as they always were.

They keep replenishing themselves.

College is a way of trying to preserve cultural memory.

It is an effort to cheat death,

so it's a kind of struggle against time and mortality.

The United States has managed to provide a postsecondary education

to a larger percentage of its population than any society in history.

But a lot of forces are converging

at the present moment to create anxiety.

Is college overrated?

I'm saying it's a myth.

It's become a race for credentialism.

Has college become too expensive?

I think it's going to tum into the foreclosure situation.

Students are gonna default...

Every parent who tries to pay for their child's education

is feeling sticker shock, and access and completion of college

are more challenging in our time.

Of all the time bombs in the American economy

set to explode,

student loan debt in this country has reached $1 trillion.

We may see a tsunami of student loan defaults.

There are problems in all the sectors of higher education,

and it's a perfectly fair expectation

for students and their families

to want to know that when they leave college,

they're going to have some skills

that somebody's going to be willing to compensate them for.

We've got a lot of people

with college degrees waiting tables, cleaning toilets, you know, driving taxis.

Nearly half of all students are showing

no significant gains in learning.

But there's an apocalyptic dimension to this as well.

And that is the idea

that the very concept of the institution

of higher learning is about to be broken.

And only a very, very small handful of colleges

will survive intact on the other side of this tidal wave.

We're at the point where people are saying,

"Maybe you don't have to go to college."

ls college worth it?

There have been moments in human history

when those who said the future's gonna look a lot different very soon

have been right.

This might be one of them.

This is the John Harvard statue.

Now, people come from all over the world

to take pictures with this statue.

In education, there are these very powerful social forces at work

where people just imitate what other people are doing

without reflecting on why they're doing it.

Things like, "How do you get into the right college?

"How does your kid get on the right track?"

College has been sold and over-sold as the key to a better future.

And somethings gone very wrong with it over the last few decades.

Higher education has had the privilege for a very long time

of being a black box.

It created this prestige and this mystique around it,

but we've never really examined very closely

the ingredients on the box.

We need to really rethink,

"What are the specific things that people are learning,

"and why are they valuable?"

Welcome, Class of 2016.

You may have sensed that some of us

are expecting you to save the world,

preferably by the time you graduate.

But just remember,

a key part of any success is the part of you that is willing to fail.

We at Harvard believe that the best

Kind of education for undergraduates

is a liberal arts education.

And that means a broad education

across the fields of human inquiry.

We aren't educating students for a first job.

We want to give them the abilities to think

and reason and question for a lifetime.

Technology increasingly is something

that every educated person should be familiar with

in the 21 st century.

We have an introductory computer science course

that is known as CS50,

and it is now the largest undergraduate course on campus.

Everyone on campus knows what CS50 is.

It's definitely a course with a cult following.

I think some of it is kind of related to the whole Facebook

and Mark Zuckerberg being at Harvard.

That's what's happening for our generation.

People are growing up, and they're starting their own companies

and creating their own websites,

and doing all this amazing stuff with technology,

and I think CS50, like, represents that.

Today we begin our exploration

of the fundamentals of computer science and the art of programming.

You will have this very practical skillset

that you can then take back to all sorts of fields.

And realize, too, it is not so important

where you end up relative to your classmates in this class,

but where you, by semester's end in week 11,

end up relative to yourself this very day.

Sometimes it can be intimidating,

because there are plenty of people who have just more preparation.

A tot of times, it's really easy to say, like, "How in the world can I do this?"

Because I can't understand everything right away.

College, it's a completely different environment

than what I was used to.

My path has been a little bit rough.

I come from a pretty, uh,

modest background.

When I entered ninth grade, the summer before,

I had been, like, enticed to join a gang. I decided not to.

They retaliated against my entire family, shooting at my home.

Because of my path and where I've come from,

I'm just that much more driven.

I remember those times,

and it just makes me all the more grateful

for the things I do have now.

Before I came here I hadn't had a bed for over a year,

and so, like, coming into my dorm, I legit jumped on my bed.

That was something that meant a lot to me.

It's a real blessing.

Just being here alone has already changed my family dynamic.

I always told them,

"In order for us to get ahead as a family,

"each generation has to do better than the next."

David was, like, "Mom, how are we going to pay for college?

"What happens if I get in and I can't pay for it?"

I said, "Trust me. God will make a way."

You should see the video when we first got it.

He was sitting there looking at the camera like he gonna be a star.

When we got on Harvard's campus, I mean, I was just like,

"My baby is at Harvard."

The first American college, Harvard College,

was a child of the University of Cambridge in England.

The Puritans had come over to New England in the early 1630s,

and after they settled the basics of food and shelter,

they turned their attention to starting a college.

In that sense the college was an offshoot of the Church.

The lecture, so central to college education,

is really a kind of modern version of the sermon.

It was a commitment to the idea that students could be transformed

to lead lives of meaning and purpose.

Harvard is the source of DNA

for almost all of higher education in America.

It laid out the model that a university needs to emulate

in order to get better resources, better professors,

better credentials, better students.

As Harvard passed that DNA down to everybody else,

it created a race.

When the colonial colleges started to become universities,

and when brand-new institutions were founded as universities,

you begin to see a tension developing

between the mission to educate young people,

and the competition for prestige,

to out-build your rivals.

American colleges are driven by the pursuit of prestige.

And the way you get prestige is that you get the highest ranking,

which expands your market, and allows you to charge more.

So, in order to go up the ladder,

everybody has to keep adding more programs and more facilities

at a faster rate than the competitors.

This really was the most sort of grandiose vision

of what a university could be,

that it was a place of higher learning, it was a place of research.

It covered every single discipline under the sun,

and there really was no end to its expansion.

And that became the model,

you had to integrate doing research.

You needed to provide the housing, the classrooms,

all the food that they needed,

and the facilities that are required in order to play in the game.

And that's a tough game to keep playing.

The system of elite residential higher education

that Americans assembled over the course of the last centuries,

is extraordinarily effective. Nobody disputes that.

But it's also extraordinarily inefficient

in terms of the resources that are expended

to produce these spectacular places.

Higher education in America

has been very successful for centuries.

But now things are changing,

because the scale and the cost is enormous.

We have a product that is so expensive that a lot of people can't pay for it

and they have to go into debt, and it just isn't viable.

The rise in student tuition is unsustainable.

We cannot continue to charge significantly

more year after year after year

without running into some kind of a brick wall.

College tuition has increased more than any other good or service

in the entire US economy since 1978.

We're in an environment

where we're cutting spending for higher education.

The states have essentially walked away.

They have this great thing in colleges and universities called tuition,

and it's been a great release valve.