Home College, or, Why Not Hire a Personal Gap Year Professor?
Shelter in place with your students.
With colleges and universities closing around the country and with uncertainty about any return to normalcy, let alone resumption of a group gatherings, why not consider private tutoring as an “alternative modality” to face-to-face teaching? While moving instruction online is the critical task of the day for college administrators, the argument for launching a college in your own home seems newly relevant.
Many working professors could singlehandedly teach a solid first- or second-year general college education in key subjects, supplemented by resources online. Most Humanities scholars are qualified to teach expository writing, at least one language (introductory Latin, Spanish, French, German, or Italian), Western history, introductory philosophy, and a variety of literature courses. Many humanists could also American government, introduction to political theory, and world history. Some could teach basic biology and the history of science. If you wanted a first year science professor, those are available too. Computer scientists and coders? There are thousands in California alone.
More importantly for face-to-face instruction, there are now thousands of newly under-employed experts in the humanities and sciences, particularly in courses that can’t pivot to online instruction: theatre, dance, engineering, robotics, chemistry, and biology.
If massive online classes offer a high-tech alternative approach to brick-and-mortar higher education, home-colleging represents a more human approach. A quarantine professor is a new iteration of the old-fashioned tutor: a highly educated personal instructor to the offspring of royalty, aristocracy, and gentry in centuries past. Nicholas Hans wrote in New Trends in Education in the Eighteenth Century, “The post of a private tutor to scions of a famous house was both honourable and lucrative. Many outstanding men of science readily accepted such posts which brought them the income and the patronage of some influential statesman or a peer.” John Locke was tutor to the young philosopher and freethinker Anthony Ashley-Cooper, third Earl of Shaftesbury. Locke later wrote, in Some Thoughts Concerning Education(1693):
“I am sure, he who is able to be at the charge of a tutor at home, may there give his son a more genteel carriage, more manly thoughts, and a sense of what is worthy and becoming, with a greater proficiency in learning into the bargain, and ripen him up sooner into a man, than any at school can do. Not that I blame the schoolmaster in this, or think it to be laid to his charge. The difference is great between two or three pupils in the same house, and three or four score boys lodg’d up and down: for let the master’s industry and skill be never so great, it is impossible he should have fifty or an hundred scholars under his eye, any longer than they are in the school together: Nor can it be expected, that he should instruct them successfully in any thing but their books.”
Even before the current crisis, it makes economic sense to hire a single professor to teach a first-year curriculum to a small number of students. Rather than spend $55,000 for a year of college at a selective private institution (without room and board, and besides, now they’ve sent your offspring home), hire a single Ivy League-trained Ph.D. with qualifications in multiple fields for, say, two-thirds the price plus room and board (which is far more than an adjunct professor makes for teaching five courses at an average of $2,700 per course).
The idea becomes more attractive with multiple students. A half-dozen families under quarantine could pool resources to hire a single professor, who would provide all six students with a tailored first-year liberal-arts education (leaving aside laboratory science) at a cost much lower than six private-college tuitions, and at the level of a real salary for a good sole-proprietor professor.
For those students and parents interested in higher ed more as a matter of signaling rather than education, consider that you could still signal prestige with your elite professor. And consider that students taking asynchronous online classes may have to wait hours to have questions answered and face another wait for followup questions. Home-colleged students can ask all the questions they want, in real time.
When college gates reopen, students would return at a more advanced level, saving a semester or more of tuition. Home-colleged students would have months of personal attention to writing skills, research skills, oral-presentation skills, and the relationship of disciplines in the liberal arts. The attention to oral and written skills may be particularly valuable to non-English-speaking students looking to succeed at an American college or university.
Accreditation is key, but if the problem has been solved at the secondary-school level for home schooling, why not in higher education? A licensed home-college professor may very well be more qualified than a university department chair to demonstrate student learning. A home-college “transcript” system would record every student and every syllabus, accompanied by a graded final exam or final paper. There would be no slipping through the cracks for home-colleged students.
In conclusion, to parents: if your offspring’s university has sent everyone home for next few months, use the time to try out home-colleging. Reach out to the faculty whose email you now have and ask if they (or a graduate school colleague) want to do a little tutoring in addition to uploading assignments to a platform. See what kind of response you get. In California, room and board may be the biggest selling point. Move fast, before domestic travel bans are announced.
