With the pandemic, the world is shifting into a changing new reality that we are experiencing, and seeing in front of our eyes. One of the biggest change for me personally, is attending Zoom University.

My college is located in New York City, but I am currently residing in China. 16 hours of flight and 14 days of quarantine away from where my school is physically located. This is possible because of the transition to online classes only, meaning I only need internet connection (including some, illegal softwares, to get pass the Chinese internet censorship to access things like Gmail) to get my education.

Aside from not being limited to geographic location, I also save a ton of time. Many classes that I take are taught in an ‘asynchronous’ format, meaning that I get to learn on my own pace, and for me, that means much more efficiently. An accounting class that I am taking would have taken up 4 hours per week of class time if taught in person, in addition to homework assignments, but instead I get to only spend 1 hour for that class in total, and still managing an A. I wouldn’t have paid attention during class anyways, I am constantly on my laptop doing some other stuff, like coding, reading, or just researching on my own on certain topics that I happened to want to research on.

To me, school is not the same as education. In fact, schools can stand in way of my education, for example, a teacher took away a book I was reading during her class in middle school, hindering my education, because I understood everything in her class already. To most teachers, I have never been a good student, but that does not mean I am not a good learner.

I would never spend 80% of my effort to get an A, because to me, that is not cost efficient. I am much happier when spending 20% of the effort to get a B in a course, because that means I was much more efficient in my education. Instead of remembering every single detail needed to get an A in the exam, I get to have time to educate myself in other ways. By reading, by experiencing, by conferencing, by going to seminars.

The ‘education’ system believes in the superior quality of the knowledge acquired through it, because the system taught it in schools, and the system measured it through exams. This is evident on the non-acceptance of home schooling or other types of non-standard education, and also to students that study in different education systems, which often do not recognize some parts of their education (such as educational level, grades, courses taken etc.) taught in another education system, where some have to revert back a year or two when transferring between education systems that disagree with each other too much.

What these systems are for, how they are built and executed, however, is extremely backwards.

Imagine a single professor teaching the same course at different universities. Are the students in those universities getting vastly different education in regards to that course? No. Yet they can be paying vastly different tuition. There has been a joke that the only difference between students in expensive private colleges and public colleges nowadays is the tuition they pay, the Zoom is all the same.

If universities keep on issuing degrees and count coursework during online learning towards graduation, then what is the point in going back to in person teaching after the pandemic ends? It has been proven that online education works for a wide range of classes, why not keep it this way?

Instead of worrying about the seating plan for the students and whether a big lecture hall is needed to accommodate the extra students this year, all colleges need is to distribute laptops to every student. In fact, it might provide better education. A snow storm, traffic jams, even a pandemic, cannot stop a virtual classroom from functioning.

Schools nowadays act more as gateways to get to the next step instead of providing meaningful education. If you are presented with a choice of obtaining the same education at half the prize as you would in undergraduate studies, but you would not be issued with a degree, most people would not have taken that offer.

That offer has always been possible, because of the internet, and consequently, mass availability of knowledge. Colleges existed because only the intellectuals had access to knowledge, and they were made professors that teach their students knowledge otherwise unavailable. Some knowledge still exists only in the heads of the few, but most knowledge can be found using a simple Google search available to everyone with access to the world wide web.

The reason why people seek to attend prestigious institutions is because those institutions are prestigious, that give out degrees branded with the highly sough after names. Does the employer care what courses or what professors that you said ‘attracted you’ to that specific university? The courses taught at those institutions have no content that is otherwise inaccessible, what is otherwise inaccessible, is the resources and social circle. That is the reason those institutions are highly sought after, and learning of knowledge comes as an after thought.

Memorable speeches on TEDx were memorable because of their content, regardless whether you listened to it in person or watched it on YouTube. Your favorite music do not suddenly become unattractive when you get out of the concert. So why does acquiring knowledge have to be any different? It is not like the quality of the knowledge is always better when you acquire it through the formal system, countless college graduates fail at their new jobs because lack of work experience, but somehow they are considered (and paid) more highly in many cases than someone who started working and gaining experience earlier but did not attend college.

Is college an investment in education? No, because those knowledge are taught for free on the internet. Are grades a reliable measure of your understanding in a certain topic? No, just because it is the only quantifiable data out there does not mean it is good data or grade inflation would not have been a thing.

But will the system stay?

Yes, because it is too big, and people are too committed, from companies who hire the people who went through the system to students paying tuition and taking on debts, as their commitment fee towards the system.

Such a big system is reluctant to change, as it refused to in the past. The basic teaching methods have remained largely the same for hundreds of years. Students are still learning in much of the same format, despite the advancement of nearly everything else.

An arbitrary syllabus teaching knowledge in an arbitrary pace that some arbitrary person deemed suitable for that particular course, in order to allow for some arbitrary evaluating method to come up with an arbitrary value, that will be forever printed on a certain piece of paper called a transcript, then transformed in an arbitrary way into another piece of paper called the degree, that somehow confirms your understanding and the school’s endorsement attesting to that fact, however arbitrary it is.

And yet this system is one of life’s most certain certainties.

How arbitrary.