Ivory Tower

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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."

REPORTER 7:
Is 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.

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