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
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.
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 thing to remember about absurd tuition is that it is, in effect, more a means of price discrimination, rather than an actual sticker price.
The system is pretty clever: Everybody cranks their rates through the roof; but they all offer "financial aid". Because they are such nice guys, they even have a standardized form(de facto, the FAFSA qualifies). By doing so, the schools can have a sky-high price for cost insensitive students(ie. cost insensitive families) and charge pretty much everyone exactly as much as they can. Even better, doing it this way allows them some pricing flexibility on their side, in case they want to attract a particularly interesting student, while also creating broadly fixed prices, which works to the advantage of the more prestigious and deep pocketed schools.
Really quite clever.
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.
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
Need for work? No.
Potentially benefit massively from in ways completely removed from work? Yes.
More education gives people a more broad experience of the world in that it opens up areas they may not have otherwise been exposed to. Sometimes this is frustrating (witness many /.ers bitching about how they had to take english lit classes when they just wanted to be engineers) and obnoxious, but it helps folks to avoid the tendency to becoming hyperspecialized drones.
A lot of people who were self-taught think that anyone who wants to know about something will just go look it up - but usually these self-taught individuals are completely unaware of huge swaths of ideas and terrain that have been explored because they weren't required to take classes in subjects that initially didn't interest them.
Full disclosure: I was sort of like that myself - I absolutely loathed the idea of certain classes that were just not interesting to me. Then I grew up, and discovered that there's more to conversation than whatever was on TV last night, there's more to life than work and talking about work, and in fact, I've been turned on to many new activities and interests thanks to some of those "useless" classes.
It also wound up having a TREMENDOUS impact on my career: I used to work in tech, and when I went back to school I wound up surveying a couple of psychology courses, and it turns out that the "expreimental design in psychology" course that I took was INCREDIBLY fascinating. Trying to design experiments with human subjects - subjects who can and will lie, try to wreck the experiment, or otherwise do the least amount of work to get their pay - is VERY challenging, VERY interesting, and VERY fun. Even better for me, I was able to bring my technology skills into a field where there is not a lot of technological know-how, and so some incredibly obvious things I developed and implemented wound up being very valuable to my lab, and helped to really accelerate my career; despite coming to the field I now work in so late in my life/career, I've been promoted several times and in the 1.5 years that I've been out of school since getting my new degree, I've been made a director at my lab.
The point to this is that we are not insects, we are not our jobs, and learning new things - even things that are possibly frivolous - is tremendous. EVERYONE in the world can benefit from learning new things, especially the people who don't have the finances to attend more expensive schools; I'll say those people are probably the ones who benefit most from exposure to new ideas and ways of being.
If your college degree is only helping in your job, or if you're going to college solely to get a better job - well, that's certainly your right, but you're really missing out on 90% of what an education can (and IMO, should) be.
Since I can't tell them apart, I treat all ACs as the same person.
To be perfectly honest, most people don't really need a college eduction. The thing is, our society seems to make more and more people take college classes. When people have no real use for the classes, the natural outcome is degree mills and cheaper education.
I think another part of the problem is it turns the rest of education into "college preparation" instead of real education. Right now, I'm almost inclined to say we want everyone to go to college, but the reason for that being that education all the way up through high school isn't much of an education. We've lowered our standards so far that we consider the ideal high school kid one who behaves himself, and we don't give any kind of vocational training or responsibility until after college. And then we can't seem to decide whether college is vocational training or real education.
I really think we need to step back and reinvent out public education by asking, "What is it that we want people to learn, and what knowledge and skills do we want the least educated in our society to have." No, I don't think that's what we're doing now. I think we're pretty well running our education system on inertia alone. But once we get good at making sure everyone knows whatever we consider the "base minimum," we can split off those who *want* to pursue further education from those who would prefer vocational training for a good job that's useful to society.
Not everyone needs to go to college, but we're better off if everyone has a decent education. Ignorance isn't good for anyone.
With college and health care, corporations have developed a really nice system of voluntary slavery.
IT is the worst- 200+ people at my company are working on a project with such insane deadlines that they are working 10 hours a day- then going home and working 2 hours off the clock.
And they are *happy* to be on this project. They are going to give up three years of their youthful lives. There is no bonus at the end for them-- there will be for the departmental president (and likely promotion to the executive branch).
You never feel, taste, spell things as intensely once you get old. Young people give up the best years of their lives for nothing. Because it only takes a couple years without a job to wipe out everything you have.
Productivity has increased by 20x since the 1950's. Yet now 2 people have to work instead of one. And they both still have to work 40-50 hour weeks.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Oh yeah, that's definitely the explanation. Tuition is high because the president of the college sits around in his office all day and lights his cuban cigars with rolls of hundred dollar bills, while wearing a tophat and monocle and scheming how to bilk the hapless freshman.
It couldn't possibly be that the cost of maintaining a university as a dedicated place of learning is just naturally expensive, what with the hundreds of content experts they employ and the hundreds of buildings they maintain. And it definitely is not linked in any way to publicly funded institutions having their appropriations from the state yanked back to pre-1993 levels.
To be perfectly honest, most people don't really need a college eduction.
That really depends on how you define "need". Most people may not need college to do their job but we have a crying need for a better educated populace. Education pays dividends in a lot of ways that aren't immediately related to someone doing a specific job.
College was the best thing I ever did for my mind. I had to read books I wouldn't have picked up on my own, had to understand points of view that I didn't necessarily agree with and learned to be skeptical of common knowledge and to trust the data. Not everything I learned was useful later, but the knowing is invaluable. Scientific method, statistics, chemistry, history...all had lessons that more than justified the cost of admission. If it were up to me I'd let anyone take as many classes as they wanted. Instead we're spending our collective treasure on supporting 12 aircraft carrier groups so we can maintain military bases in the butt crack of civilization because so many in the uneducated fraction of society feel entitled to drive an SUV the size of a Bangladesh apartment.
Besides, without college I would have missed the lesson in biochemistry and science of attraction I got from a lab partner who was one of the hottest women on campus. She'd wear nylon shorts and half tops (back in the day you could dress like that on campus) and come in from the heat with a hint of perspiration mixed with a dab of Obsession perfume. That alone was worth a semesters tuition.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
witness many /.ers bitching about how they had to take english lit classes when they just wanted to be engineers
My beef with lit classes in college is that they are all about kissing the professor's ass. If that's the direction you want to go, more power to you. I love Shakespeare and one of the worst mistakes I ever made in college was taking a Shakespeare class.
Disclaimer: My favorite class in High School was an American lit class with a teacher who loved to teach and inspire students. He certainly inspired me.
As a science major, I felt a great disturbance in the force when Reaganomics shifted universities from learning and R&D institutions into glorified trade schools. The engineering and computer science programs were particularly overwhelmed by students whose talents and interests were elsewhere but whose counselors and student debt demanded that they get a degree in what's hot at the moment. A few years later it was MBA and we got a glut of substandard MBAs, then it was Law and I don't know what's next, but I don't think it serves any of us for students to ignore their talent and to have their focus driven, not by their personal aspirations or talent, but by the whims of the stock market their freshman year.
The same goes for basic scientific research. For the most part, in the U.S. funds for basic research is dried up. R&D instead is funded by those with a vested interest in getting the answer they want. "X- drug is safe and effective", "Tobacco is harmless", "Toxic waste is good for you."
IMHO U.S. university focus on the bottom line has turned them into trade-schools, ponzi schemes and country clubs. The fact that the price of university education has risen FAR faster than inflation convinced me that this is yet another bubble. Kudos to openuniversity and straighter to deflate this bubble before it blows up as spectacularly as dotcom and housing have.
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.
A friend of mine recently decided to enter school, not having pursued any secondary education after high school. He asked for my help with prep for a math placement exam, not wanting to waste his money and time on remedial courses that would not have even counted as credits toward his degree. If this kind of 'corporate education' was more established at the time, he could have spent some money, worked his ass off, and placed higher on the placement test. Consider this small course list a 'beta' for this type of education.
It's not just a dedicated place of learning, it's a place of research.
Many of the top schools aren't called "top schools" because they teach well. They're top schools because they have to researchers and experts a wide range of subjects who make themselves available to students. If you have a large number of the top people in the world, and they all expect to have the highest salaries of anyone in their line of work, then you have to find a way to increase income to meet their demands. When you see a faculty to student ratio, it can be interpreted as the number of students it takes to pay one person's salary (on average).
This is all on top of providing infrastructure and a vast number of services to enough people to fill a small city (in many cases).
What you've described is basically the premise of every Gender Studies class. Well, except that the teacher will argue that all women are angels and all men are evil creatures who oppress aforementioned angels.
To be fair, there are good teachers who will reward you for putting in effort to thoroughly explain a dissenting opinion. But the level of indoctrination that goes on in these feminism-oriented classes is just plain scary.
Yet another reason I'm glad I'm Asian and not white.