Slashdot Mirror
All-You-Can-Eat College For $99-a-Month
theodp writes "Writing in Washington Monthly, Kevin Carey has seen the future of college education. It costs $99-a-month, and there's no limit on the number of courses you can take. Tiny online education firm StraighterLine is out to challenge the seeming permanency of traditional colleges and universities. How? Like Craigslist, StraighterLine threatens the most profitable piece of its competitors' business: freshman lectures, higher education's equivalent of the classified section. It's no surprise, then, that as StraighterLine tried to buck the system, the system began to push back, challenging deals the company struck with accredited traditional and for-profit institutions to allow StraighterLine courses to be transferred for credit. But even if StraighterLine doesn't succeed in bringing extremely cheap college courses to the masses, it's likely that another player eventually will."
This already exists... I went to community college for about $300-$400 a semester, including books, supplies and parking. What, just because it's on the internet, it's a new concept?
Oh. RIGHT...
if the answer isn't violence, neither is your silence / freedom of expression doesn't make it alright
When $99/month becomes the future of (community) college, then you're going to see people competing for the schools that are desirable enough that they can still charge $30K/year like the Ivies do.
Then again, most people coming out of those aren't going into IT... except as managers.
Futurist Traditionalism
Now go ahead and wonder why smart but poor students need to sell their future to get a chance for a decent life.
This type of system will never dominate the top engineering/science schools. The key to a top notch eng/sci school is extremely knowledgeable faculty that know how to teach and know what material/projects are important for students. Maybe that's why this StraighterLine company focuses mostly on freshman courses...
As a consequence, such an "education" as described in TFA is more a training system, the reproduction of the proletariat, not an education, not a method of making connection.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
This may be credits for cheap. You may be learning (nearly) as much as a regular university and you may even do it faster. BUT I didn't think that was the purpose of university. I thought the whole point was to get a high paying job. And I'm unconvinced that this can provide.
If you just wanted to go to school to learn sure. But I don't think that has been the main focus for many years now.
"Facebook protest".
Your ancestors - Not impressed.
We already have that and it is called CLEP.
From the article:
"Smith said that the quality of his education team is high, and their biographies indeed include an Oxford Ph.D...."
In order to demonstrate quality, a reference to the traditional educational model (oxford) is made, and this ploy is nothing more than a tacit admission that traditional education is still the best. Would they ever claim that their faculty includes graduates of StraightLine (or some equivalent) itself?
If a person dreams of an education that is fast, cheap, and easy, that person is simply not fit to be educated. StraighLine, with its crass ambitions, hopes to satisfy the demands of such shiftless people.
The first thing that comes to mind is that this is not bucking the system, or at least not the system of traditional college education. Rather, this is bucking the more recent trend of exorbitant prices for sheets of paper, not even sheep skin, where what the student has learned is perhaps of little or no consequence. To be frank, compared to what the University of Phoenix of Walden charges, this may be a steal.
I did not read the links, but the ad copy stated that the college provides freshman credits, which implies that the credits can be transfered to another university. I am sure the ad is not lying, and the implied transfer of credits can happen, Universities do not have to accept transfer credit. I do not know if they offer degrees, but again, employers do not have accept degrees from all universities as equal. Therefore there may be value there in cost effective remedial courses, but time will only tell if the college provides educational value.
Of course, if we are optimistic there is no reason why it should not. For instance, at $100 a month, a semester is around $500. For community colleges, one might be able to get 6 hours for not much more than that. A full load would cost up to four times that much. That, however, pays for a lot of brick and motor, a lot of face to face time with professors, and perhaps way too much administration. It seems that someone could harness the efficiencies and supply a decent alternative at a 25% saving. I am just not sure why anyone would, at least in terms of a for profit corporation.
In any case, like all education, it is buyer beware. Verify that the credits are transferable. Watch for other fees that at some places can double the cost. If there are degree programs, are they what one needs. The big thing lately are they pushing financial aid and loans. Some places seem to solely exist to get kids to take out loans to pay tuition, without providing any credible product in return. This is an issue because, unlike other loans, there is often no way to shed college financial aid, short of paying off every penny of the principe, interest, and fees.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
As a professor, I have two tasks that I must perform in every class I teach. I must educate my students, and I must evaluate their work. No one has ever explained to me how the 'evaluation' process can reasonably work in an on-line setting. Nothing is stopping me from enrolling my girlfriend's cat in an on-line degree program and taking all his tests. I assure you, Marvin's grades will be very good, but I don't suggest you hire him; he would be sleeping on the job an awful lot.
It's a shame, because I think that for many students, these kinds of programs could provide an education as good or better than a traditional classroom for a much lower price. But until there is a good reason to take the final transcript seriously, I don't think it will ever really catch on.
Think! It ain't illegal yet!
George Clinton
It's not just freshman classes that subsidize the more expensive offerings. Humanities courses cost less than sciences but are billed at the same rate, so English departments subsidize more costly departments. The people in these institutions are uncomfortable talking about who subsidizes whom. In business, the criterion is simple: make your unit profitable or it dies. Colleges have been unwilling to live by that. As a result, programs aren't cut and tuition only goes up. But as we know, unsustainable trends cannot be sustained indefinitely. The brightest minds no doubt will continue to get free rides to places like Harvard, but I suspect that some other bright minds are at work on creative ways to get tuition within reach for those who have to pay their own way.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
If all you want to do is learn for free, you can always watch lectures online.
http://www.youtube.com/user/MIT
http://www.youtube.com/user/stanforduniversity
http://www.youtube.com/user/ucberkeley
You can even get lectures from Australia or India:
http://www.youtube.com/user/unsw
http://www.youtube.com/user/nptelhrd
And if you want to learn stuff like how to solder and splice try http://www.tpub.com/neets/
Or watch someone make vacuum tubes:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gl-QMuUQhVM
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9S5OwqOXen8
Sure you might not be able to afford all that equipment to actually do everything. But at least you have a better idea of what you might like and what's worth it before forking out lots of money (or going in debt) in fees.
sounds a lot like the open university course idea they have in the uk, maybe its diff in the details but the key problem will be the same, it won't count as much in the eyes of the employers (just my 2c)
I wasn't aware that Colleges and Universities were for-profit driven businesses. I just don't accept the premise that "freshmen lecture" is driven by profit motive.
Degree mills and correspondence schools aren't really anything new. Online education isn't really either. I remember 25 years ago QuantumLink (the predecessor to AOL) had an online university program. At the time I was a dumb kid and thought the same thing the author of this article thought. 25 years later it didn't change the entire landscape of education, and neither will this. Whiz-bang technology might make some parts of education easier, but the distance aspect of online education is always going to make things more difficult.
Also, like it or not there's a HUGE component of education that's simply driven by the name and reputation of the school you went to. How many people really want to proudly say they went and graduated from the $99 online school? As others have pointed out we already have a 2nd tier of education with Junior colleges. I certainly wouldn't want to start comparing the actual quality level of one vs. the other, but what I DO question is whether there's really a need for a 3rd tier of these Walmart schools (low low prices!).
AccountKiller
As near as I could see from their web site, they offer 11 courses, one or two of which were "pending". Might be a deal if you need some of those 11, but you aren't getting a degree that way.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
While it's true that English departments cost less to run than, say, a chemistry department, there are generally larger grants and scholarships available to science departments to offset their costs. The fixed costs, such as professor salaries and department administration, would be about the same across like-sized departments.
I disagree with your assertion that a unit needs to be profitable to exist. There are many worthwhile pursuits that often fall under the radar of popularity, and thus profitability. To axe, say, the philosophy, languages or forestry departments would be doing a disservice to the society as a whole. Research isn't about what is profitable *now,* it's about trying to figure out what might be useful for society in the future. That's an expensive task that's littered with more failures than successes, but the successes need the failures. It's like trying to find a single door in a very large room blindfolded. You're going to bump in to more walls than you are the door, but that's all part of the process.
If there was a magic wand that we could wave that would show us only the most efficient and profitable ways forward, you could be sure it would be used. The reality is, however, that we don't know what research will bring us from one moment to the next. Did we know that research into computer networks in the 50's & 60's would eventually allow us to converse across distances like this? Of course not, but we're glad it did.
I've seen plenty of teams where many of the members were willing, but the skill/effort level was - to say the least - weak (or lopsided). There were some cases where the weaker-skilled members WANT to learn, and benefited from the skills/knowledge of the others, but plenty of other times where there was a team member of two who simply did not give a shit.
Now perhaps this does reflect the real-world in that getting saddled with a semi-useless team-member can often happen, but it also encourages the lazy ones to develop habits where they latch on to skilled workers, do little, and take as much credit as they can. I highly doubt teachers are unaware of this, as often they like to mix these individuals with the more skilled workers, but it would make sense if the grades reflected this rather than giving the lazies a free pass.
I've had team members of many calibers. Brilliant workers who also excel in teams are - of course - quite rare, but are a real treat to work with.
I've had some team-mates who were simply under-skilled/under-taught, in which case they actually became very helpful when brought up to speed. I can even drop my ego enough to admit I've been there myself, learning new tricks/skills from somebody in the group who knew more about X than I did.
I've also had team members who simply couldn't seem to grasp the material at hand despite strong effort. The best solution in that case was to funnel them to whatever tasks they could manage best, and leave them off the core work but hope to help them understand it as best they could. Y
ou also get lone-wolves that can't seem to work well in groups. You can usually do well with them if you can set them to something tasking but requiring minimal interaction.
The last two categories are the voluntarily-useless and the credit-takers. The most frustrating part is that they're often quite clever, but can in no way be motivated to learn or attend to the task at hand, and would rather show up hung-over from weekend partying while everyone else was burning the weekend-oil. Thus far the best approach I've seen to this was to have the other team members document and account for their own tasks as well as possible to avoid the credit-stealing aspect, and then treat the rest as "damage control"
At a university, if your science faculty is not self-sufficient then you should get to hiring new ones. All the real labs at a university (the ones that do research, not teach freshmen) are grant supported, but before the lab gets that grant the university takes between 50-60% off the top. More than enough to pay for the small amount of consumables you go through in an intro science lab.
It's of course different for a teaching college if your science faculty is doing no research, but that is fairly rare in america. I would hope the guy from the linked article knows his school's stats, but most college students in the US have science classes that are subsidized by the science faculty's work, not by english majors.
An online education is an education of sorts, but it's not a college education unless you go to a college.
Forget "who you meet" and "the contacts you'll make." Nobody gives a rat's ass about that garbage unless they're "damn glad to meetcha" econ scum headed to business school. Nobody I met in college has anything to do with my current career.
The big problem with online higher education is that you can't have a decent frat party by yourself and the sex is really inferior.
I piss off bigots.
Could it allow one to "challenge" courses as a more accredited college/university? One might end up having to re-take various courses but it could be useful for a head-start.
After you take to your up to eleven courses, you can get credit for them at a total of four accredited institutions. I didn't look closely, but at least one of them is a junior college. So this "revolution" that Slashdot is reporting on, only is only relevant to a very small percent of the population.
Democracy Now! - your daily, uncensored, corporate-free
$99 a month? Shoot! I can beat that price easily.
By placing a small speaker under your pillow at night and playing a recording of a nice lecture on Economics, Psychology, Political Science, etc., you can learn effectively while you sleep. There will be no more rushing to class or waiting in long lines for textbooks.
If I can persuade a few colleges and universities to accept these sleep learning credits, then who can stop me?
Let me assure you, for many students, the lasting difference between a sleep learning session and actual class attendance would be very slight.
For exams, do what is done for Technical Certification Exams: Have the student take the exam at a proctored facility, like Prometric (http://www.prometric.com/default.htm). Anyway, Computer based courses at the University level are really not new. In 1977, I took introductory Logic using video terminals (I believe they used PLATO). We could learn the coursework and take our tests via CBT. We could also attend lectures with about 700+ fellow students. Most just took the CBTs
From the StraighterLine web site:
When you take a StraighterLine course you will select one of our Partner Colleges to award credit for the course. You can continue your major studies and pursue your degree through this college or transfer those credits to your college of choice.
The important part they are leaving out is that the "college of your choice" does not have to accept the transfer credits.
Lets you take what you want for a change. Why yes, I'm pretty sure the sciences are the thing for me and I would have liked to take more things like chem and bio and not all that foreign languages you dirt bags shoved down my throat, never mind the humanities. Turns out being the worlds foremost expert in me I was pretty much spot on with that assessment before college. (Why yes, I am a little bitter about my college experience. Why do you ask?)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
I don't know where you have worked, but The Open University is very highly regarded everywhere I have worked (large companies, household names), and by extension its graduates enjoy the same reputation. The fact that its graduates have shown the enthusiasm and work ethic required to complete full-strength degrees in their spare time reflects well upon these people when assessing their worth to a company.
There were very, very few classes I ever took that gave me more than I could have read in a book. Almost everything I have learned, I have learned from reading on my own time.
And 90% of my professors were not particularly bright people -- although they all had long lists of credentials. (I went to a top university).
In a nutshell: College is an absurdly overpriced system of structured reading. Why our society demands such a bizarre institution, I have no idea. Perhaps it is a way to force the uninterested and the undisciplined to do what they wouldn't normally do.
I believe in books (and the web of course)
Structure is for those who wouldn't or can't learn without it. Why extol a system which provides support for those who need it in order to learn anything?
------ The best brain training is now totally free : )
It depends on the school.
Up here in Canada where I went to there were regulated and unregulated programs, defined by some government board. Regulated meant that they could only raise tuition a certain amount per year (2% or something like that) and unregulated meant they could pretty much charge whatever they want. I used to go to tuition forecasting that the Dean put on every year as it was a fascinating look at how the university operated. It turns out that they run a lot of the humanities / arts programs in the red because they are not allowed to raise the tuition to an amount that keeps them out of it. The solution was to charge business / engineering / law / medicine more, not just because they are more expensive, but also to subsidize the humanities / arts programs that were not able to break even due to government controls. Even within engineering, there was a huge difference between the amount of money various programs costed. Mech and electrical engineering were actually quite cheap due to the amount of students in them. Over in geological engineering (mine) it costed a lot more per student due to classes with less than 20 students in the program per year, expensive road trips (can't learn that much geology sitting inside), and a high number of faculty.
It's annoying to hear some film major bitch about his a $100 increase to his $1800 tuition when you are busy paying $8-9k/year (on the expensive side for Canada).
Just where the hell are our children, THE FUTURE, going to have awful, spurious, unsatisfactory sex for the first time?
Oh.....yeah.... Onlinebootycall.com.
Damn you, comprehensive beast that is the Internet! Damn every call you've ever made to the collective booty!
Has been lost over the centuries to the point that they are now simply degree mills with some research om the side.
The concept of a "Community of teachers and scholars" still exists yes, but only to the extent that it provides a basis for funding for the institution as a whole.
At one point the purpose of a university education was to produce a graduate with a well rounded education, someone versed in the humanities, sciences, mathematics, able to discuss Plato or Galileo with a broad understanding of both.
Try discussing Plato with your typical graduate with a BS or MS in computer science and what you will most likely get are blank dull cow like eyes.
Many would argue that the lack of a "classical education" in a CS grad is meaningless, but I would disagree since in a "classical education" there is much to be derived to address many problems in life as well as work.
Of those of you in a CS pipline at any collage, what courses are you required to take outside of that course of study? More then likely it is very little. When you graduate, you may know a great deal about CS but what would you know of philosophy, botany, pick any other "worldly subject"?
I for one would like to see trade schools in computer programming, electronics etc. for subjects that have for to long been considered the private domain of the collage/university and have them recognized as valuable sources for skilled professionals in those fields.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Tell me that again in 20 years.
The thing is, you may be the world's expert in the 18-year-old NotSoHeavyD3, but you're not yet the world's expert in the 45-year-old NotSoHeavyD3.
Those two versions of you may have different opinions.
Education is a service, like any other. There's nothing magical about it that makes it inappropriate to offer for profit. This $99/month educational buffet we're discussion came from the private sector because someone saw a way to make money by charging less. This is a good thing.
Space game using normal deck of cards: http://BattleCards.org
Their course selection is sparse with only 9 courses available, and the subject of all their courses appears to be non-technical, elementary, and uninteresting (to me at least).
It would be interesting if they were offering advanced courses in various disciplines as well. E.g. senior-level classes in political science, philosophy, CS courses like advanced C# programming, etc.
The biological, physical, and behavioral sciences are under-represented in their course catalog, they don't even have a history course. And mathematics is represented at a poor level; most science majors at a uni would be taking calculus in their first Freshman semester, not "Precalculus".
It would be a waste of your time if you had already taken some college classes, so it's not as if students may defect to a service like this as some sort of replacement for their UNI.
So you pay $99/month and get access to maybe at most 10 courses, but most of them have implicit pre-requisites, eg.. it would be unusual to take English Composition I and II simultaneously; 5 courses fall into that category.
So you would be taking at most 5 courses at a time. By the end of 2nd semester, there'd be no courses on this site left for you to take; I seriously doubt they can add many courses at a quick rate, it's costly to develop.
Their service is no replacement for going to an institution, which has to accept you anyways for you to obtain credit, and even if you were to take all of the courses they offer and get credit for all of them, you won't be close to a degree.
So this could very well be an upsell to the universities who will give credit for some of their courses. They can use this to get more students who would otherwise be going to different schools.
Science department generally require faculty to write grants to cover part of their salary. Furthermore, non capital purchases often incur a fee payable to the university. For instance, if a grant pays for $1000 of supplies, then the researcher might have to pay $200 to the university from the grant.
Then grants often cover graduate students,who tend to teach the basic freshman courses.
I really don't believe that any courses subsidize other courses. For a person who completes a degree, they may pay a little more up front and get the extras later on, be it a lab, or access to celebrity artists, or professors with industry contacts. Those that do not finish a degree has other issues, like financial aid that need to be repaid on minimum wage.
IN fact, the profit center for many universities is the professional degrees, such as the corporate MBA programs.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I love the idea of this. All the courses you want to take for $99 a month. Even if you did a four year degree you're in the hole for roughly $4,800 as compared to the $33,000 I'm in the hole for my B.Sc.
This is going to be very disruptive. If I could do my masters studies for $99 a month I'd jump at it. And I know there is a big push in the legal community on the ABA to accept distance learning for legal jurisprudence degrees. In essence it would force states like RI to honor a JD obtained online instead of making you wait five years.
The late 30 year old version of me.(I know, I know, it's just my word on that of course but yes I'm old for a techie.) Some how I don't think my position, which has remained unchanged for 20 years, is going to change drastically in under 10. (I thought their position was horse shit when I heard it at 18 and I still think it is today, decades later.)
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
From the original post: "... there's no limit on the number of courses you can take...."
From the company's description of the deal: "Take only one course at a time, move on the next course after completing the last"
Am I missing something here?
Sorry, applying profitability measures to what is almost entirely a nonprofit enterprise is silly at best.
Even if you were to go down that route, you have to acknowledge that teaching "unprofitable" sciences provides an irreplaceable service: legitimacy.
I'm fully aware of the *legal* distinction. Nevertheless, I used the term "stealing" deliberately. This is not akin to singing "Happy Birthday" without putting a royalty cheque in the mail. This is knowingly helping yourself to products that cost hundreds of dollars to obtain legally.
When I was a child, stealing was an easily understood concept. When something was offered for sale and (without the seller's consent) you took it without paying, that was called stealing.
As adults, we convolute the simple truths that children understand. You assert that copyright holders are not deprived on anything "they had before". That may be true, but they are deprived of the money I should have paid to own their product. I still call that stealing.
So, have I "been brainwashed by big media interests", or have you been brainwashed by people who deal in legal semantics?
Exams are proctored by a local testing center that verifies the student's identity and ensures a trusted testing environment. The University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign (http://online.engineering.illinois.edu/policies/eop.htm) requires a proctor for all exams. The course content is the same for both on-campus & online students.
It might be true that the humanities departments cost more to run than the science departments, but science departments usually also get some funding from the federal government and private business via grants and research funding, which the humanities do not, at least to the same extent. In any event, colleges are not (usually) businesses, so they are not and should not be concerned with turning a profit.
What does the US have against free colleges?
Norway has free universities. Norway has had this for a long time and it works great. The universities work just like any other university except they don't provide living quarters. This though is provided by large student organizations at reasonable prices for students.
Say NO to unpaid Internships!
How could you possibly evaluate the accreditation of a scheme like this? Who grades the work? Computers can't grade essay questions, and multiple choice isn't sufficient to evaluate college level work. Where's the exposure to other students you normally wouldn't interact with? College is a process of intellectual ripening and social coming of age; a computer can't substitute for a brick building, unless you are already past your formative years. Will there be enough revenue to compensate the person who puts the lesson plans together (you know, the one with the earned Ph.D).
Or just skip all this crap and get a free MIT education http://ocw.mit.edu/OcwWeb/web/home/home/index.htm .
If you can't figure out how to get a degree in this day and age, you probably aren't college material in the first place. Work part-time, take out loans, apply for grants, use employer tuition assistance, join the military and use the GI Bill...there are any number of ways to pay tuition. Hell, move to Florida; you can get a BS from one of the big schools (UF/FSU/USF/UCF) for less than ten grand, and it only takes a year to become a resident. Depending on your field, graduate school can be free as well; science and engineering colleges typically have plenty of TA positions that pay 15 to 25k annually, sometimes with health-insurance, and almost inevitably with the tuition waived.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
In my country education is free...
No, it's just PRE-PAID. And overpaid. And if you didn't pay for your education, that means that the government robbed someone else to pay for it. It's a totally immoral system. How do you socialists sleep at night?