Carey’s pronouncements aren’t uninformed, and he is no stranger to the workings of higher ed. His father was a professor of computer science, and his mother earned a doctorate in education. Carey makes thoughtful use of digital analytic tools in his writing on data and education for The New York Times, and his think tank has deep ties to the technology industry. The chairman of its board, for example, oversees Google’s executive team. So it’s no surprise that Carey writes glowingly about the cool-sounding startups he toured in Palo Alto and San Francisco that want to “hack” higher ed. Readers learn about these endeavors in an awkward chapter entitled “Thunder Lizards,” which concludes breathlessly with this takeaway: “Another group of startup companies was aiming for full-scale Godzilla-style higher education disruption, with the burning cities and charred carcasses of advancing tank brigades.”

Carey sees this kind of disruption already approaching what he terms (with an ironic nod to the University of Pittsburgh and its landmark building) “cathedrals of learning.” He defines these “cathedrals” as elite institutions that are proud of how difficult it is to get admitted onto their campuses. Three of the handful of schools he reports visiting—Harvard, Stanford, and MIT—admit fewer than 10 percent of their very strong applicant pools. This dynamic of exclusivity is, Carey contends, about to change. Big time.

Those that cannot change will disappear. The story of higher education’s future is a tale of ancient institutions in their last days of decadence, creating the seeds of a new world to come.

In this book, the rhetoric of disruption is nearly apocalyptic.

While a whiff of resentment lingers around Carey’s prose concerning elite institutions, he remains enamored by their prestige. When he signs up for an online biology course as part of his research, he heads right to MIT’s offerings and appears proud to report his test scores from the class. (This author isn’t just smart; he’s MIT smart!) Carey’s point, though, is an important one: The online class that the Cambridge institution makes available and free to anyone in the world through its “MITx” program is good enough for teaching something as advanced as complex genomics. You don’t have to get admitted to MIT to learn this stuff. Funny though, when MIT makes its classes available online for free, more people than ever apparently want to attend the school as formally enrolled students. Carey, however, doesn’t discuss why they want to study and work face-to-face rather than watch what happens from a distance on a screen.



Carey contrasts the pedagogical sophistication of the best MOOCs, like his MIT biology class, with what he imagines to be the careless, untrained in-person teaching of research-oriented professors. He is quite sure that students get little out of sitting in lectures: “With lectures, it’s always distance education,” he writes. And he makes a strong point about the disconnection of students in the back of the room from the sage on the stage. But he presents no data or arguments on why some teachers are better than others, or about why in-person education might have some benefits. He wants to convince the reader that universities are merely defending the velvet ropes of exclusivity. He writes that the current system of getting into college “is a lot like being invited onto a yacht … where you get to sip cocktails served by attractive young women.” Really? For whom is this true?