A Tale Of Timesharing: How Universities Enable Efficient Resource Utilization.
Over the past 6 months, we’ve seen nearly every University in the country shift to online digitized learning.
It’s clear that for the sheer and rote knowledge transfer part of education, digital lectures and learning schema are economically superior to the old-guard of in-classroom lectures.
So why are students still heading back to campus this fall?
Why attempt in-person reopening at all when students can safely watch their lectures and write their code and papers from the safety of their homes?
While I believe that the answer is highly dependent on the [misaligned] motivations of administrators, University finances, and local economies, I want to explore, with the perspective of my recent bachelor’s and master’s degrees, why STUDENTS are opting to go back to campus.
One caveat before I begin: At some point, I will write up my full view of how the status-quo University education and institution should be revamped and reevaluated as a result of new enabling technologies (VR, at-home 3D printers and fab equipment, etc.), a looming debt crisis, and the current global pandemic. I’ll also explore what I view as misaligned administration, University finances, state, and local economic incentives and motives for reopening. I would be remiss if I don’t acknowledge two astonishing facts:
- The average cost of annual college tuition increased by 25% from 2008 to 2018.
- Aggregate student debt in the United States increased by 107% from 2009-2019, totaling more than $1.6 trillion.
Here I set the problems with the University and education in their current forms aside and dive into one HUGE reason why I think students are willingly returning to campus: Universities enable efficient resource utilization.
Let’s explore how the University (as a macro institution) evolved to be the goose that laid the golden training egg.
Class Time VS. Lab Time
In-person CLASS time pales in impact compared to in-person LAB time and learn-by-doing engineering, science, and fabrication.
This dichotomy between class time and lab time came to the forefront this year as the COVID-19 pandemic uprooted students all over the world.
Classes shifted online, but it’s that critical time in the lab that is noticeably missing. For me, graduating in May 2020, I enrolled in a hands-on metal additive manufacturing class.
I intended for the class to help me learn by operating machines, refining parameters, and understanding the dynamics of the bleeding-edge of additive manufacturing.
When COVID-19 canceled our ability to go into campus buildings, our heavy load of lab learning assignments pivoted to dull online lectures and reading papers.
It’s safe to say that the quality of the course fell far below my expectations, thanks to the disappointing (albeit necessary) shift away from lab experience.
LEARNING vs MAKING Anything, Anywhere, at Anytime
We (most of American society) think of the University as the gold standard for training our young people.
There’s an extraordinary reason for that. Universities, particularly large STEM-focused research universities (think MIT, Harvard, Stanford, The University of Wisconsin-Madison, etc.) are one of the most important drivers of scientific advancements in human history.
But why, especially now in an ever-digitized world where, as we’ll see later in this blog, anyone can **learn** anything, anywhere, at any time, do we still consider brick and mortar Universities to be the gold standard?
When it comes to innovation and STEM education, we need to explore why Universities continue to evolve their capabilities, and why students continue to buy in despite rising tuition costs, dramatic levels of student debt, and the proliferation of digitized and demonetized alternative ways to learn.
Here’s why I believe young STEM innovators-in-training still flock to the University: these young innovators are drawn to the hyper-concentration of resources and the superpower to **make** anything at any time, within the confines of the University campus.
Physical facilities to learn, explore, and make things dramatically weights the net-positive value modern Universities provide.
There are few other places on Earth where just about anyone can access facilities to design and make almost anything. If you are aware of another, please link in the comments section so that other readers can plug in!
For most fields of research, innovators still need access to expensive capital equipment.
Achieving Economies of Scale and High Utilization Rates
I spent four years learning about materials engineering and, during that time, I spent more time watching recorded lectures on 2x speed than I did physically in class. But I also had the privilege of spending upwards of 500 hours working in a world-class materials science lab with millions of dollars of fabrication and analytical equipment at my disposal.
Here’s an example. Electron microscopes are critical for just about anything you want to do in materials science and engineering, most sects of small-scale biology, and other fields. You simply need a really high-fidelity, expensive microscope to see the nano-scale, sub-microsecond state of today’s science.
So I called one of the leading manufacturers of electron microscopes to get pricing. A brand-spanking-new, cutting-edge electron microscope runs about $1.2 million in fixed initial investment and $80,000 in annual maintenance contracts and replacement parts.
Obviously, such a price is cost-prohibitive for any ordinary individual at the start of their career. Likewise, even if an individual had the cash and facilities to own and operate their own electron microscope, they alone could not possibly spend enough time cranking out work on the machine to justify the expense. One machine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison logs well over 5,000 operating hours per year, over 13 hours per day on average… and that number is non-inclusive of downtime for maintenance.
Any grad student in hard science, engineering, design, and even many disciplines of art can attest: these massive pieces of equipment reach incredibly high utilization rates. My labmates and I spent our share of 12:00 a.m. nights grabbing what time we could on an electron microscope or equivalent equipment.
Bill Gates, Paul Allen, and many other computer-age titans learned to program on bedroom-sized, time-shared mainframes at the University of Washington.
Put another way, the University pioneered the sharing economy we are seeing today.
From another angle, the University is one of the few institutions on Earth where problems in cancer, genetics, nanotechnology, aerospace, energy, and manufacturing can all be solved on the same pieces of equipment, back to back, in the same 24/7 workweek.
Where It All Began: The Early Research University
Sharing expensive resources to maximize utilization dates back to the earliest days of the Research University.
Take, for example, Justus Von Liebig’s pioneering 1826 chemistry lab at the University of Giessen in Germany.
A newly appointed professor at the University of Giessen, Liebig and his colleagues attempted to open an institute for pharmacy and manufacturing.
The story goes that the Giessen’s powers-at-be spurned at Liebig and his colleagues, believing that training “apothecaries, soapmakers, beer-brewers, dyers and vinegar-distillers” was not the role of the University.
In spite of the University’s disdain, Liebig opened up his shop as a private endeavor to train in practical chemistry, using a shared chemistry lab, in parallel with his job as a University professor.
Figure: Liebig’s 1826 organic chemistry lab in Giessen, Germany.
The program was a wild success; his compilation of brains and resources enabled innumerable innovations in chemistry, pharmacology, agriculture, and many other fields.
In fact, Liebig’s private venture was so successful that in 1833, the University of Giessen realized that they missed a massive opportunity. That year the institution annexed and scaled Liebig’s lab, bringing the laboratory space to the forefront of the classroom.
Success came not from theoretical science but from the new innovation model and the resource utilization efficiencies gained by sharing lab resources, from glassware to chemicals.
To this day, Liebig’s innovative model for teaching practical chemistry and organizing the chemistry lab for shared research stands in Universities to this day.
I see important lessons to learn from the Liebig story for Universities:
- How can we (and our institutions of education) adapt to practical, hands-on maker and innovator movements and capitalize on economies of scale?
- With this awesome advantage of the University identified, how can we intentionally re-engineer training, learning, and education?
Converging Time Shares & Economies Of Scale
Now back to how modern-day Universities enable efficient resource utilization.
As equipment became more and more complex and capable, the capital efficiencies achieved across different pieces of equipment started to intersect and evolve together to create extraordinary new capabilities.
Researchers realized that they could build their own modifications to the University’s million-dollar electron microscope for pennies in campus machine shops. Then they could take the complex data that they collected from that microscope and apply powerful artificial intelligence analytics on the University’s shared supercomputer resources.
The utilization loop goes on and on, over and over driving constant improvements to the efficiency achieved by the time-share model.
Conclusion: At Some Universities, You Can Make Anything.
If you know what you are doing, you can make literally anything that you can dream of within a half-mile radius of top engineering campuses.
There are few places with more diversely utilized 3D printers, laser cutters, Arduinos, mills, and lathes than a university maker space, or machine shop.
At many universities, you can even create new alloys in fully-functional foundries located in the basement of their materials science building.
Where else in the world do you have the infrastructure to go from raw metal to finished computer chips in a matter of, say, a weekend?
Spoiler alert: There aren’t many.
Universities are the most efficient system that we’ve devised to date to maximize utilization rates and drive down the marginal cost of operating the extremely expensive, physically large equipment that society needs to keep on the bleeding edge of the hard sciences and engineering.
I’ll end by challenging us to realize the root-causes of how Universities became such central, powerful institutions in modern society.
By recognizing where and how Universities excel, we will be able to more efficiently and effectively utilize, take advantage of, and rethink the resources that they offer.
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