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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
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.
The fact that the people running the companies that make up most of the economy are chosen based on who they know despite their lack of ability to find their ass with both hands and a map is a large part of the reason that the global economy is melting down right now.
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.
But work on a team project and make a connection, make friends that can help you later, and people you can help later
You know what I learned from "team" projects in college?
Just do the whole damned thing yourself if you want any shot at passing. Because otherwise, come the due date you'll have your part done, one person with a partially-working-but-incompatible part, and three people with weak excuses.
I learned that "team" really does have a "me" in it, and you can't spell much with "ta". And, after 10 years in the "real" working world, I haven't found much to change my opinion on that matter.
THAT'S why people spend stupid amounts of money on an Ivy League education. "What you know" is assumed. "Who you know" is particular and requires access.
One small correction there - In the case of Ivies, "Who you know" counts as a prerequisite for getting in, not a benefit of going there.
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
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 felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of Liberal Arts students suddenly cried out in horror.
Oh, yeah, it's not easy to pad these out to 120 characters.
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.
Doctors in England and France do quite well, and their entire health care system is run not-for-profit. In Europe doctors don't have to deal with insurance reimbursement troubles, can focus entirely on treating patients and making them well, get paid more for improving the health of their patients, and still make enough money to be considered upper class. There is a good way and a bad way to run health care and education, a free market/capitalistic approach is a bad way. It's non-optimal. Solutions that are good for organizing the general economy aren't always great for solving social problems.
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