To me, this means that the same amount of learning should occur, funded by less resources. As I was thinking about how that could occur, I kept returning to a feeling I had from my large state school undergraduate education of maddening inefficiency caused by classes trying to cover so much material with the resources they had. Maybe an equation would look like this:

 (1 professor * 60 students * 10 week terms * X dollars) / (thousands of pages of reading) = very little learning resources for the amount of content to be covered

Each student taking three or four classes (and holding down a part time job perhaps) was forced to execute a balancing act. Everybody decided what they wanted to dedicate their time to, and the only sure thing was that there was no way to do everything every professor expected from them. (Video games, sports, socializing and TV were priorities for many as well.) 

Class discussions rarely ever covered all the material assigned for the day, of which each student rarely had the time to complete anyway. Class discussions were sparse, and you could usually tell which five or six students in the room had managed to thoughtfully complete a particular reading assignment. Everybody else was busy copying down notes as fast as they could to summarize what they needed to know from the readings they hadn't done instead of reflecting on authors' arguments and doing the real analytical work and productive, collaborative discussion the professor had imagined would fill classroom hours. The result in their notebooks and minds was 60 collections of scattered thoughts on a topic, rather than a well-rounded whole. I've got a box in my garage of notebooks that have some real gems in them, but they are weeks of effort away still from something I could turn into a contribution to the field.

Professors spend a lot of their effort designing courses to curate up interesting analysis and comparison of high quality scholarship, but the execution is weakened by this inefficiency. Students all duplicate each other's efforts, to the degree that they make time to. There is little opportunity for the classroom network to collect in an artifact that they can build on later that's better than my box of notes.

It struck me that there was a great deal of potential for deep learning in this equation, but it was wasted by spreading attention so thinly over ideas. There is so much potential energy in a room of 61 active minds trying to examine a particular topic, but discussion is almost worthless if they're not on the same page. I had the feeling that the four or five years each of these students spent here produced a box of notebooks much like mine instead of creating something really fabulous. 

I think if a university wants to get more "bang" for its buck, or equal bang for less buck, cutting down on the reinventing the wheel problem I felt is an important part of the solution. To me, the main advantage of a university education was the huge amount of potential energy created by learning networks in each classroom that persisted for 10 weeks at a time. The institution of higher ed creates this potential. The people there were dedicating most of their effort for four or five years to learning. They were in the same place at the same time, dedicating their focus to particular subjects with others, yet they come out of it with what they can remember, plenty of practice writing 5 page papers, and a box full of disorganized and abandoned notes. The 50 or so learning networks I had in those classrooms don't exist anymore, the Blackboard sites we put a tiny portion of our discussions on have been closed down, and we never seemed to make use of that huge potential created by us sitting for some years in an institution of higher learning. But I think it's important to remember that the institution created the space for this potential energy in the first place, as was emphasized in "Dean Dad's" post on his early reactions to the book.