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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
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.
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. A 2 month on the job training would do better than college for 65% of most jobs.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
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.
You miss the point. This doesn't mean getting a degree from the University of Phoenix... You take the fluffy liberal arts prereqs of which most universities require a good two years' worth, then get your actual degree from the Ivy.
And I have no problem with that, as long as they actually uphold some decent academic standards rather than just passing any moron who can pony up a C note. Personally, I did something not all that dissimilar - I went to a community college for a liberal arts AA for $800 per semester, then transferred into a decent 4-year as a Junior. Dropped the total cost of my education by about 45%, and I have the same papers as those who paid the full 4-year tuition.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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.
I loved my Shakespeare prof in college. I took him for 2 Shakespeare classes and a classical mythology. One of the things I loved about him was that he didn't require you to agree with him. You DID, however, have to read--the best bullshit detector I've ever come across.
I had a prof for a Thoreau class, though, who fit that negative stereotype perfectly. Outdoorsy hippie naturalist students got As; those of us who, for example, interpreted vast sections of his writing as masked professions of homosexual longing, however, found ourselves with Cs on every assignment. I actually went to her office twice and basically pleaded, "What do you WANT?" It was a required 400-level class, and I was just trying to get out of school at that point. I'd been kind of biding my time in the English department, waiting for the International Studies degree program to start, after which I could transfer in all my Japanese language and Asian history/poli-sci/economics credits and get a degree that reflected what I'd actually spent my mental energy on--a program that, once it finally materialized, was in the ART DEPARTMENT--No thanks! I'll take English over that!!!
She told me I needed to try to get in touch with nature more.
Towards the end of the class I just kind of gave up. I said, "I don't see why my personal philosophical orientation towards nature should have anything to do with my grade in a literature class." I kind of resigned myself to getting a C in my last semester of university, in my major department, and having to take another semester to make up that one class.
Then my professor invited a renowned Thoreau scholar to come speak to us.
He said at one point, "of course, all serious Thoreau scholars now recognize that Thoreau was gay, and that much of his writing was an attempt to deal with that in a society in which that could be dangerous." I shot a glance at my prof. She blushed and lowered her eyes.
I got an A.
If you are a high school or early-undergrad who is reading this, please take my advice on this: DON'T major in English, or any of the humanities, unless you want to be a teacher. That is coming from a university English professor (well, a linguist, whose research is all statistics, but who works in an English department). Just don't do it. It is a silly place.